Delusion

by Peter Abrahams

  “Can’t do that,” said the sergeant.

  “Plus we have some normal clothes for him. My client is not appearing in court attired in this prejudicial way.”

  Pirate didn’t know what that last sentence meant, but he liked the effect she was having on all these officers of the law. They were frowning, turning red, puffing out their chests; he almost laughed out loud. And maybe he did, just a little, because an officer of the law or two shot him a look, quick and nasty.

  Then came a long silence. Pirate was familiar with silences like this, had witnessed plenty in the last twenty years: whoever spoke first lost.

  The sergeant said, “Someone go get the chief.”

  A minute or two later, the chief appeared. Pirate wouldn’t have guessed that, expected a chief to be dressed in a fancy uniform, while this man wore a gray business suit; but everyone called him chief, so Pirate knew. The chief was trim and broad-shouldered, not as big as Pirate; one of those handsome types with some Cajun blood, dark-haired and dark-eyed. People were explaining things to him. The chief listened, his eyes on Pirate. All at once Pirate remembered that brown-eyed gaze, seemingly sympathetic, remembered who this was, remembered a detective named Jarreau. And now: the chief?

  The room went quiet. The chief spoke. “No shackles,” he said. “No cuffs. He can wear street clothes, but go through them first. Two court officers behind him at all times.” The chief turned to Susannah. “Good enough?” he said.

  “Thanks,” Susannah said.

  “It’s discretionary, as you say,” the chief said. “Anything else?”

  “I’d like a few minutes alone with my client.”

  “Stay as long as you want,” the chief said, “but a court officer is here at all times.”

  Susannah gave the chief a long look but didn’t argue. Everyone except one uniformed man went away. The uniformed man sat on a stool in the corner. Susannah approached the cell.

  “Can’t be in contact range with the prisoner,” the guard said.

  Susannah stopped about three feet from the bars.

  “How are you, Mr. DuPree?”

  “Um,” said Pirate. “You know.”

  “You must have a lot of questions.”

  There was always that one question: Why did God pick on Job in the first place? But other than that, Pirate couldn’t think of any.

  “About the hearing, for example?” Susannah said.

  “Yeah, the hearing,” said Pirate.

  “First, I don’t want you to be nervous.”

  “I’m not,” Pirate said, which wasn’t true: thoughts about Esteban Malvi and the Ocho Cincos kept coming, unstoppable.

  “Good,” she said. “You won’t be required to say a word. I’ll be sitting with you the whole time. As for what to expect, there’s no telling. My customary advice in these situations is to expect the worst.”

  “No problem,” said Pirate.

  Susannah gazed at him for a moment, then went on, but suddenly distracted again by the beauty of her skin, so soft and glowing, he missed most of what she said, just catching the last few words: “…haven’t been able to find out what it means, if anything.”

  “What what means?” said Pirate.

  “This last-minute change in judges,” Susannah said. “That I’ve been explaining.”

  “How many judges are there?” Pirate said, a little embarrassed, wanting her to know he was interested in what she had to say.

  “How many judges?”

  “Like nine or something?”

  “Nine?” Susannah laughed. “Are you talking about the Supreme Court?”

  Pirate didn’t like that laugh. All of a sudden he was seeing flaws in her skin, or flaws that could be there with a little help. He said nothing.

  The laughter left her face. “There’s just one judge,” she said. “The judge on the schedule—a good ol’ boy apparently, but with a decent reputation—got pulled for some reason and we don’t know much about the replacement.”

  “Never got along with good ol’ boys,” Pirate said.

  “Then maybe this is a lucky break,” Susannah said. “The replacement’s certainly no good ol’ boy—she’s black, for starters.”

  That wasn’t good either.

  And young, besides. That was the first thing Pirate noticed when they led him into the courtroom. Pirate found himself blinking, even though it wasn’t very bright. Then, as the blurriness cleared, he saw the judge, sitting up high with that hammer thing—name escaping him at the moment—beside her. The judge looked about Susannah’s age, but not so friendly. She saw Pirate following Susannah to one of the two long tables in front, Bible in hand, and frowned. Pirate began to change his mind about protective custody.

  He sat down, feeling strange in regular clothes: a suit, in fact, brown, with a white shirt and a beige tie. Pirate had never actually owned a suit, not if a suit meant the pants matching the jacket. He’d once had a purple jacket with silver buttons; in fact, it hit him at that moment, he’d been wearing that purple jacket the last time he was arrested.

  “You all right?” said Susannah.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I want you to meet,” she began, and then introduced the man sitting on Pirate’s other side, a Jewish-sounding name that Pirate didn’t quite catch.

  “Hold on tight,” said the man.

  Did he mean the Bible? Pirate had it in his usual grip, loose, fingering the gold tassel. He glanced around, saw lots of people sitting in back, a few still coming in. And one of those—a tanned, in-shape-looking woman, older than Susannah but just as pretty, in a softer, better way—he recognized. Pirate had seen her only once, and that was twenty years ago, but he would never forget that face, not so soft, on second thought. Oh, no. She was the woman who’d sat in the witness chair—in this very courtroom?—pointed right at him and said he was the one. But he wasn’t the one; and the whole thing came flooding back: how he’d been down in a holding cell, still in that purple jacket, waiting to get bailed out on an everyday B&E he’d done, maybe unwisely, on the spur of the moment, when the next thing he knew he was upstairs getting asked about the Parish Street Pier, where he’d never been, and somebody named Johnny Blanton, who he’d never heard of. He didn’t do it, didn’t kill Johnny Blanton, had still to this day not yet killed anyone in his life. The woman—he’d forgotten her name—met his gaze, then quickly looked away. Oh, yes. At that moment, starting to get wound up like he hadn’t been for a long time, Pirate remembered how hard he’d worked to be at peace. He turned around, opened the Bible in his lap.

  For he saith to the snow, Be thou on earth; likewise to the small rain, and to the great rain of his strength.

  “Are you all right?” Susannah said.

  Pirate nodded, kept reading.

  “This court is now in session. All rise.”

  Pirate rose with the others, sat down when they sat down. Things started happening, but Pirate’s mind was elsewhere. He could tell from the tones of all the voices that a big argument was going on. A little guy with a mustache who kept stabbing with his finger wanted to keep him in prison. Susannah’s Jewish buddy wanted to get him out. They fought about the tape. They fought about Napoleon Ferris. Someone from FEMA, whatever that was, took the stand. A fight broke out about how the tape got found, then about whether this FEMA guy knew someone at the Justice Project. And had he also once been busted by a cop named Bobby Rice? So was this all about getting revenge on Bobby Rice? But what sense would that make? said the Jew, real sarcastic: Bobby Rice was already dead before the tape got found. Did you ever consider it might be a plot against the whole department? said the finger stabber, even more sarcastic. The fighting moved on. Someone else took the stand. Was it true that there was tension in the department between the chief and his deputy? Voices rose. Pirate lost interest.

  Time passed—a loud and angry blur of sound. Pirate found himself reading and rereading the part about the great rain. God, a whirlwind, made the great rain. He suddenly got it. Great r
ain plus whirlwind: hurricane. The great thing about the Book of Job was—

  All at once Susannah gripped his knee. It shocked him. He jerked upright, stared at her. She pointed to the judge. The judge was speaking.

  “…and in terms of establishment of reasonable doubt, if this tape had been produced at the original trial, it is the opinion of this court that despite…”

  A minute or so later, she banged that hammer thing.

  “Oh my God,” said Susannah. “You’re a free man.”

  Then came all sorts of turmoil. Pirate’s tongue got thick, making coherent speech impossible. Susannah turned him toward a door. Pirate saw the tanned, fit woman again, the one who’d ID’d him. He got that weird, squinting feeling in his non-eye, a little painful this time, because of the tiny weapon. The soft skin on the woman’s face dissolved and he saw underneath, glimpsed something all twisted up. She might not have long to live.

  CHAPTER 11

  You went to the hearing?” Clay said. “I don’t understand.”

  They sat in a coffee shop across the street from the museum. A DK Industries grader went back and forth over the spot where the Cloud Nine had stood, its attenuated arches making the stolen sculpture seem much taller than it really was. “Is that what matters—that I went?” Nell said. “What about the result?”

  “Anything can happen in court,” Clay said.

  “Was it because of that judge? Would the other one, Earl Roman—”

  “No telling,” Clay said; but didn’t she hear doubt in his voice? And hadn’t she caught a flash of anger in his eyes, merely at the mention of Earl Roman’s name? “But tell me why you went to the hearing,” he said.

  “What’s wrong with me going?” Nell said.

  The coffee came: an espresso for Clay, a latte for Nell. The cup looked tiny in his hand. He had beautiful dark hands, powerful and finely shaped at the same time, two perfect incarnations of him. “What’s wrong?” he said. “For starters, why would you want to subject yourself to it?” He sipped his espresso, watching her over the rim of his cup. She almost thought there was something professional in his look.

  “I just had to see him.”

  “Why?”

  “To see what he looked like.”

  “Doesn’t matter what he looks like now,” Clay said. “People change in twenty years.”

  “I know.” Other than his size, Alvin DuPree had looked nothing like he had back then, either in her memories of him in court or on the Parish Street Pier; so much older, much more than twenty years’ worth, so scarred, so worn; all of him so different, except for one small similarity—that remaining pale blue eye.

  “So why, Nell?”

  “I told you.”

  “Why didn’t you bring it up before?” Clay said.

  “You’d gone to work. It was spur-of-the-moment.”

  “Spur-of-the-moment.”

  “Yes.”

  “You hadn’t been thinking about it?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “Not really.”

  “No.”

  “So what provoked this spur-of-the-moment decision?”

  “Clay? I feel like I’m being questioned.”

  A pained look rose in his eyes. “Sorry, baby,” he said. He reached across the table, laid his hand on hers. She felt a little better right away. “There was no call from Lee Ann Bonner, or anything like that?” he said.

  “A call from Lee Ann?”

  “Before you jumped in the car and rode down to the courthouse.”

  Nell withdrew her hand. “There was no call from Lee Ann,” she said. “I can think for myself.”

  “Hell, I know that,” Clay said. “You’re the smartest person in my life, always have been, always will be. I just can’t get the reasoning behind—”

  She interrupted. “Don’t you see? What if I put the wrong man behind bars? Destroying a whole life, Clay—he’s old now, he lost an eye, God knows what else happ—”

  “Stop,” said Clay. “Stop right there. “You didn’t put—”

  The waitress came by. “You folks all set? We’ve got some nice almond cake today, baked fresh. On the house, Chief.”

  “We’re fine,” Clay said. “And we’ll be wanting a check when it’s time to settle up, please.” She went away. He leaned forward, lowered his voice. “You didn’t put anyone behind bars. A jury did that. And it wasn’t just your testimony. DuPree was a known thief, with a record—a record that included a very similar nighttime attack where he showed a knife, and that could easily have had a similar ending if a cruiser hadn’t by chance—”

  “And that bothers me, too,” Nell said. “That the knife never got found.”

  “No case,” Clay said, “not one, ever gets resolved without a loose end or two. It doesn’t mean things don’t add up. Forget your sighting of the knife. We had the knife wound. We had his previous knife history. That adds up.”

  “But what happened to the knife?”

  Clay raised his hands. “He threw it in the bayou.”

  “But divers went in there and they didn’t—”

  “Or in the bushes somewhere, or down a drain, or in a trash can. Doesn’t matter. He did it.”

  She gazed at him. To know someone so well, to know exactly what he was thinking, but to disagree, or at least be in doubt: Nell felt the first twinge of a special kind of pain restricted to good marriages alone.

  “But what about the tape?” she said.

  He gazed back at her. “This is going to be hard for you, Nell, but—we may never know.”

  “Never know?”

  “The story of the tape, who fabricated it, why, all those other questions someone with a mind like yours—a conscience like yours—needs answers to. I was downstairs, watching on the closed-circuit hookup, and that’s the feeling I got, a real bad feeling—we may never know.”

  Never knowing? At the moment, that struck her as intolerable. Would time change that, bring acceptance? She knew time had the power when it came to some things, but that didn’t make it right, was more a sign of human weakness.

  “I don’t understand about the FEMA guy maybe having some grudge against Bobby Rice,” she said. “And what was all that about tension between you and Darryll?” Darryll Pines was the deputy chief, had been deputy chief back when Clay was still a detective.

  “He wants my job, has always wanted it—that’s no secret,” Clay said. “But that can happen in any organization—we work together fine.”

  Nell had a sudden thought. “How did Darryll and Bobby get along?”

  Clay took another sip of his espresso, again gazed at her over the rim of the cup, again a gaze that reminded her of his profession. “Where are you going with that?”

  “Nowhere,” she said. “I’m just trying to understand.” She reached across the table, now laid her hand on his. Clay had thick veins on the back of his hand; she could feel blood pulsing inside. “Is this about protecting Bobby’s memory?” she said. “Is that what you’re doing?”

  “Bobby’s memory doesn’t need my help,” Clay said. His cell phone went off. He answered, listened, clicked off. “Got to go.”

  “Is it about this?”

  “No,” Clay said, rising. “Bank robbery in progress, out in River-bend.” He laid some money on the table.

  “Be careful.”

  “Always,” he said, leaning down and kissing her. Then, his face very close, he added softly, “We may never get to the bottom of this. Don’t let it ruin anything.”

  Their eyes met. There was nothing professional in his gaze now, she thought: just him and her. “I would never do that,” she said. “But whatever happens, DuPree is guilty, right?”

  His mouth opened, closed, opened again. She could smell his breath, always fresh and sweet, now with an espresso overlay. “I just don’t know, baby.”

  Nell felt blood rushing from her head, a flood, almost faint-inducing, as though a plug had been pulled inside her. “You don’t know?”

  He p
ut his finger over her lips. “One way or another,” he said, “we have to put this behind us, move on. Okay?”

  She tried to nod like it was okay, maybe shifted her head a little. He smiled at her, turned, and walked toward the door; then stopped suddenly and came back. “That Norah matter?” he said, glancing around; the waitress was busy behind the counter, the only other customers sat across the room. “It’s all straightened out.”

  “Thanks.”

  “There’s her to think of, too,” he said. “We’ll get through this. All of it.”

  They were a team; yes, intimates in every way. The feeling of his finger on her lips lingered even after he’d left the coffee shop and driven away, siren on. The sound faded. Nell called the house, got no answer. She tried Norah’s cell. Same.

  Nell drove out to Parish Street, parked at the towpath, stood on the edge of the bayou, where the pier had been. The bayou was all cleaned up, as Kirk Bastien had said: garbage, wrecked cars, and all the dead things—trees, birds, fish, the dog—gone. There was even a little current flowing downstream toward the Gulf, and a crab scuttled through weeds on the far bank. Had Kirk really fired those two assistants? Was that somehow part of the cleanup, a ritual sacrifice to nature? If so, what kind of sacrifice would be necessary to make up for all that Bernardine had done?

  Nell closed her eyes, tried to imagine darkness, a full moon, Johnny. She remembered Johnny talking about the contours of the sea bottom and a giant funnel; she could picture the big man stepping out from behind the support post, and how the bandanna had fooled her into thinking his face was deformed—as DuPree’s face later became. Was there meaning behind that? Nell wrestled and wrestled with the idea, got nowhere.

  She sat down on the edge of the bank, feet dangling, watching the current. Cloud reflections drifted on the water; when viewed from a bit of an angle, they could have been shadowy things far far down. Johnny had shielded her. The man had spoken behind the bandanna, just the single word—“money”—not enough to have left her with a trace of the sound of his voice even back then. Then had come the long blade and the sound of steel on bone, in bone, through bone, a sound still clear in her mind even now, sitting by the cleaned-up bayou. The knife had slipped out of Johnny; the curve of the blade visible in the moonlight and like the sound of the stabbing, still clear. Then, too late, she’d resisted, kicking out, and caught that one glimpse of his face. Nell closed her eyes again, tried and tried to see that face. Her mind offered up the paltriest of visions, no more than an oval, blank and white, all except for the pale blue eyes, which she pictured vividly for a moment before they got all mixed up with the eyes of the Fortune Teller. She regretted sitting in the last row in court; up front, she might have gotten a better look at DuPree’s eye, those two moments when he’d turned around. Had he recognized her? He hadn’t shown the slightest sign, in fact, had seemed barely there the second time, as though on some sedative. Were his lawyers allowed to—