by Tami Hoag
Marcus often wondered what might have been had Pam not misconstrued his interest and called the sheriff's office. They could have had something nice together. He had pictured it a thousand times: the two of them living a quiet, suburban kind of life. Friends and lovers. Husband and wife.
In the last few months Marcus had developed a strong dislike and disrespect for the sheriff's office and officers. Except Annie. Annie wasn't like the rest of them. Her heart was pure. The politics of the system had yet to corrupt her sense of fairness.
Annie would look for the truth, and when she found it he would make her his.
Victor rose at midnight, as he always did. He hadn't slept well. Fragmented dreams had driven into his brain like shards of stained glass. The colors disturbed him. Very red colors. Red like blood and black too. Dark and light. Light the color of urine.
The colors were too intense. Intensity was painful. Intensity could be very white or very red. White intensity came from soft and coolness; from certain feelings he couldn't name or describe; from specific visual images— semicolons and colons, phrases in parentheses, and horses. White intensity also came from a collection of precious words: luminous, mystique, marble, running water. He especially had to steel himself against the words. Luminous could produce such white intensity he would be rendered speechless and immobile.
And just a fine degree to the right of white intensity was red intensity. Like a circle with Start and Stop together. Very red intensity came from heaviness, pressure, the smell of cheddar cheese and of animal waste—but not human waste, even though humans were animals. Homo sapiens. Red words were sluice and bunion and sometimes melon, but not always. Very red words he couldn't verbalize, even in his own mind.
He pictured them as objects he could allow himself only glimpses of. Jagged, erect, slab, mucus.
Very red intensity squeezed his brain and magnified his senses a hundredfold until the smallest sound was a piercing shriek and he could see and count each individual hair on a person's head and body. The sensory overload caused panic. Panic caused shutdown. Start and stop. Sound and silence.
His senses were full now, like water goblets lined up on a quivering, narrow ledge, the water moving, lapping at the rims and over them. Mask, he thought. Mask equaled change and sometimes deception, depending on red or white.
Victor stood in his room near the desk for a long time and listened to the fluorescent bulb in the lamp. Sizzle, hot and cold. An almost white sound. He felt time pass, felt the earth move in minute increments beneath his feet. His brain counted the passing moments by fractions until the Magic Number. At that precise instant, he broke from his stillness and let himself out of his room.
The house was silent. Victor preferred silence with darkness. He moved more freely without the burden of sound or light. He went down the hall and stood at the door to his mother's hobby room. Mother forbade him access to the room, but when Mother was asleep her thoughts and wishes ceased to exist—like television, On and Off. He counted by fractions in his mind to the Magic Number and let himself into the room, where he turned on the small yellow light of the sewing machine.
Dress forms stood here and there like headless women garbed in the elaborate costumes Mother had made for past Carnivals. The forms made Victor uneasy. He turned away from them, turned to the wall where the masks were displayed. There were twenty-three, some small, some of smooth shiny fabric, some large, some covered with sequins, some stitched like needlepoint faces with a protruding penis where the nose should have been.
Victor chose his favorite and put it on. He liked the sensation it gave him inside, though he couldn't name the feeling. Mask equaled change. Change, transformation, transmutation. Pleased, he let himself out of the room, went down the stairs and out into the night.
21
Kay Eisner had learned to hate men at an early age, courtesy of an uncle who had found her too tempting as a seven-year-old. No man she'd known in the thirty years since had caused her to change her opinion. She scoffed at the book that claimed men were from Mars. Men were from hell, and how every woman on the planet didn't see it was beyond her. War was a bloody game played by men. Politics was a power game played by men. Crime was a cancer in society, perpetrated and spread predominantly by men. The prisons were overflowing with men. Rapists and killers prowled the streets.
It pained her to have to work for a man, but men ran the world, so what were her choices? Arnold Bouvier was her foreman, but every hand doing the dirty work gutting catfish in his plant belonged to a woman. They were working extra shifts and overtime these days, on account of Lent coming up. Catholics all over America would be stocking up on frozen fish.
Kay had worked the Saturday second shift, thinking all the while that the overtime pay would bring her that much closer to her dream of going into business for herself. She wanted to sell collectible dolls by mail order, and deal with as few men face-to-face as she could.
She double-checked the locks on her doors—front and back—before going into the bathroom. Her work clothes went immediately into a diaper bucket with water, detergent, and bleach to combat the stink of fish. She turned the shower as hot as she could stand it and scrubbed her skin with Yardley lavender soap. The room was thick with steam by the time the hot water ran out.
Kay cracked open the window to cool things off. She dried her curly hair with a threadbare towel, never looking at herself in the mirror above the sink. She couldn't stand looking at the body that had betrayed her time and again throughout her life by attracting the attention of men.
Men were the scourge of the earth. She thought so no less than ten times a day. Thinking it now, she pulled on a shapeless nightshirt, went out of the bathroom and down the hall to her bedroom. She remembered the open bathroom window just as she lay down to sleep, her body aching with fatigue. She couldn't leave it. A rapist was prowling around the parish.
As if Kay had conjured him up from her nightmares, he emerged from the darkness of her closet as she started to rise. A demon in black, faceless, soundless. Terror cut through her like a spear. She screamed once before he struck her hard across the face and knocked her backward onto the bed. Twisting onto her stomach, she tried to pull herself across the mattress. But even as her instincts pushed her to escape, a fatalistic sense of inevitability filled her. The tears that came as he grabbed her by the hair were as much from hatred as from pain. Hate for the man about to rape her, and hate for herself. She wouldn't get away. She never had.
22
He remembered a woman. Or he had dreamed about a woman. Reality and its opposite floated around in his brain like the stuff in a Lava lamp. He groaned and shifted positions, sprawling on his belly. The rustling of the sheets was magnified to the sound of newspaper crumpling right next to his ear. That was when he remembered the booze—lots of it. He needed to pee.
A hand settled low on his back and a warm breath, stale with the smell of cigarettes, caressed his ear.
"Rise and whine, Donnie. You got some explaining to do."
Fourcade.
Donnie bolted up and turned, twisting the sheet around his hips. He cracked his skull on the headboard and winced as pain bounced around inside his head.
"Jesus! Fuck! What the hell are you doing here?" he demanded. "How'd you get in my house?"
Nick moved away from the bed, taking in the state of Donnie's bachelor habitat. Coming through the kitchen and living room he had surmised that Donnie had a cleaning woman, but not a cook. The kitchen garbage was full of frozen dinner cartons. A decorator had coordinated the town house so that it felt more like a hotel suite than a home. This had been a model to entice prospective buyers into the Quail Court condo development—until the unfortunate demise of Donnie's marital state. He had commandeered the model when he separated from Pam.
"That's nasty language for a Sunday morning, Tulane," Nick said. "What's the matter with you? You got no respect for the Sabbath?"
Donnie gaped at him, bug-eyed. "You're a fucking lunat
ic! I'm calling the cops."
He snatched the receiver off the phone on the nightstand. Nick stepped over and pressed the plunger down with his forefinger.
"Don't try my patience, Donnie. It ain't what it used to be." He took the receiver away, recradled it, and sat down on the edge of the bed. "Me, I wanna know what kind of game you're playing."
"I don't know what the hell you're talking about."
"I'm talking about you jerking Lindsay Faulkner's chain, telling her you gonna sell the realty. Telling her you got some big catfish on the hook down in New Orleans. That where you got the money to bail me out, Donnie?"
"No."
" 'Cause that would have a very poetic irony about it: You kill your wife, collect the insurance, sell her business, use the money to bail out the cop that tried to kill the suspect."
Donnie pressed the heels of his hands to his aching eyes. "Jesus, I have told you and told you, I did not kill Pam. You know I didn't."
"You're not wasting any time making a buck off her. Why didn't you tell me Friday about this pending deal?"
"Because it's none of your business. I have to take a piss."
He threw back the covers and climbed out on the other side of the bed. He walked like a man who had fallen out of a moving car and rolled to a hard stop in the gutter. Black silk boxers hung low on his hips. He hadn't managed to take his socks off before succumbing to unconsciousness. They drooped around his ankles. The rest of his clothes lay where he'd dropped them as he'd peeled them off on his way to the bed.
Nick rose lazily and still beat him to the door of the master bath.
"You're dragging it low to the ground this morning, Tulane. Long night?"
"I had a few. I'm sure you can relate. Let me in the bathroom."
"When we're through."
"Fuck. Why'd I ever get hooked up with you?"
"That's what I wanna know," Nick said. "Who's your big money man, Donnie?"
He looked away and blew out a breath. He grimaced at the smell of himself as he inhaled—smoke, sweat, and sex. He wondered vaguely where the woman was. "No one. I bed. It was a bluff. I told that little Cajun gal."
"Uh-huh, and she's going over those phone records we pulled on you, Donnie," he lied. "She's gonna know ever'body you know by the time she's through."
"I thought you were out of this, Fourcade. You're off the case. You're suspended. What do you care who I called or why?"
"I got my reasons."
"You're insane."
"So I hear people say. But, you know, it doesn't matter much to me, true or not. My existence is my perception, my perception is my reality. See how that works, Tulane? So, when I ask are you trying to swing a deal with Duval Marcotte, you need to answer me, because you're right here in my reality right now."
Donnie closed his eyes again and shifted his weight from one foot to the other.
"We're gonna stand here 'til you wet yourself, Donnie. I want an answer."
"I need cash," he said with resignation. "Lindsay wants to buy out Pam's share of the business. But Lindsay's a ball buster and she'd love nothing more than to screw me out of what she can. I want back the property Pam hid for me and I want every dime I can get out of Lindsay. I made up a little leverage, that's all."
"You think she's stupid?" Nick said. "You think she won't call your bluff?"
"I think she's a bitch and I'm not above doing something just to aggravate her."
"You're just gonna piss her off, Donnie, same as you're pissing me off. You think I'm stupid? I'll find out if what you're telling me is a lie."
"I gotta see if I can withdraw that bail," Donnie muttered up to the ceiling.
Nick patted his cheek as he stepped away from the door. "Sorry, cher. That check's been cashed and the cat is outta the bag. Hope you don't live to regret it."
"I already have," Donnie said, ducking into the bathroom, penis in hand.
Annie turned the Jeep in at the drive to Marcus Renard's home. It was a pretty spot ... and a secluded one. She didn't like the second part, but she had made it clear to Renard over the phone that other people knew she was visiting him—a little insurance in case he was toying with the idea of dismembering her. She didn't tell him the person who knew she was coming here was Fourcade.
While she had been with Fourcade last night, forming their uneasy alliance, Renard had been calling her at home, leaving the message that Fourcade had paid him a visit earlier in the day. In calling, Renard had saved her from the job of formulating an excuse to see him.
"I couldn't think who else to turn to, Annie," he'd said. "The deputies wouldn't help. They'd sooner see that brute kill me. You're the only one I feel I can turn to."
The idea, while it might have overjoyed Fourcade, gave Annie no comfort. She had told Fourcade she wouldn't play the role of bait, yet here she was. Assessing the suspect in his home environment, she told herself. She wanted to see Renard with his guard down. She wanted to see him interact with his family. But if Renard perceived this visit as a social call, then she was essentially bait whether she intended to be or not. Semantics. Perception was reality, Fourcade would say.
That son of a bitch. Why hadn't he told her he had come here? She didn't like the idea of him having a hidden agenda in all this.
The driveway broke free of the trees, and a lawn the size of a polo field stretched off to the left. The expanse was nothing fancy, just a close-cropped boundary meant to discourage wildlife from getting too near the house. She passed an old carriage shed that had been painted to match the house. Fifty yards farther into the property stood the home itself, graceful and simple, painted the color of old parchment with white trim and black shutters. She parked behind the Volvo and started toward the front gallery.
"Annie!"
Marcus came out, careful not to let the screen door slap shut behind him. More of the swelling had gone out of his face, but there was still no definition to his features. Most people would recoil from the sight of him, despite the fact that he was neatly dressed in crisp khakis and a green polo shirt.
"I'm so glad you've come." He enunciated his words more clearly today, though it took an effort. He held his hands out toward her as if she were a dear distant cousin and might actually take hold of them. "Of course, I was hoping you might have called me back last night. We were all so upset."
"I got in late," she said, noting the slight censure in his voice. "By the sound of it, there was nothing to be done by that point."
"I suppose not," he conceded. "The damage was done."
"What damage?"
"The upset—to me, to my mother, most especially to my brother. It took hours to calm him. But we don't have to stand out here and discuss it. Please come in. I wish you could have accepted the invitation to dinner. It's been so long since we've entertained."
"This isn't a social call, Mr. Renard," Annie reminded him, drawing the line clearly between them. She moved into the hall, took it in at a glance—forest green walls, a murky pastoral scene in a gilt frame, a brass umbrella stand. Victor Renard peered down at her between the white balusters of the second-floor landing, where he sat with his knees drawn up like a small child, as if he thought he could make himself invisible by compacting his frame.
Ignoring his brother, Marcus led the way through the dining room to the brick veranda that faced the bayou. "It's such a lovely afternoon, I thought we could sit out."
He pulled out a chair for her at the wrought iron table. Annie chose her own chair and settled herself, careful to adjust her jacket so that the tape recorder in the pocket didn't show. The recorder had been Fourcade's idea—order, actually. He wanted to know every word that was spoken between them, wanted to hear every nuance in Renard's voice. The tape would never be admissible in court, but if it gave them something to go on, it was worth the effort.
"So, you said Detective Fourcade violated the restraining order," she began, taking out her notebook and pen.
"Well, not exactly."
"Exactly what
, then?"
"He was careful to stay back from the property line. But the fact that he came that near was upsetting to my family. We called the sheriff's office, but by the time the deputy arrived, Fourcade was gone and the man wouldn't so much as take a statement." He dabbed at the corner of his mouth with a neatly folded handkerchief.
"If the detective didn't commit a crime, then there was no statement to take," Annie said. "Did Fourcade threaten you?"
"Not verbally."
"Did he threaten you physically? Did he show a weapon?"
"No. But his presence was a perceived threat. Isn't that a part of the stalking law—perceived threats?"
The fact that he, of all people, would try to make use of the statute against stalking turned her stomach. It was all she could do to school her features into something like neutrality.
"That particular law leaves a great deal of room for interpretation," she said. "As you must be well aware by now, Mr. Renard—"
"Marcus," he corrected her. "I'm aware that the authorities will bend any rule to suit them. These people have no respect for what's right. Except you, Annie. I was right about you, wasn't I? You're not like the others. You want the truth."
"Everyone involved in the case wants the truth."
"No. No, they don't," he said, leaning forward. "They had their minds made up from the first. Stokes and Fourcade came after me and no one else."
"That's not true, Mr. Renard. Other suspects were considered. You know they were. You were singled out by the process of elimination. We've been over this."
"Yes, we have," he said quietly, sitting back again. He studied her for a moment. His eyes were more visible today, like a pair of marbles set into dough. "And you did state you believe in my guilt. If that's so, then why are you here, Annie? To try to trip me up? I don't think so. I don't think you'd bother, knowing nothing I say to you could be used against me. You have doubts. That's why you're here."
