Cajun Waltz (22 page)

“It's short for Adele.”

“Ah.” R.J.'s shoulders fell, relieved of the strain of staying upright for so long. “I was afraid of that.”

*   *   *

D
ELLY DEFIED ALL
good sense by not going straight to the police from the hospital. Instead she drove to the little ranch she shared with her stepdaughter. She pounded the steering wheel and cursed herself for retreating in a fluster while R.J. had stood there smug as a dictator's son. She told herself that she would have him arrested tomorrow. She'd be Delly Franklin one more day, and Adele Billodeau ever after.

She was surprised to find her husband's car parked trunk-open in front of the house. Arthur Franklin came out lugging a bedsheet stuffed with clothes and tied at the corners like Santa's bag. Fiona followed him, popping gum. Delly got the picture at once and pleaded with her not to do this. The girl twisted past her and slid into her father's car. “It's not forever,” she said.

Delly glared at Arthur. “Happy?”

“She's been beggin' me to take her.” He was wearing the same suspenders with which he'd hung those same trousers on the shower rod the day he and Delly got married, to steam the wrinkles smooth; a trivial failing, it encapsulated all the reasons she couldn't stand the sight of him. He stuffed the sack of clothes into his trunk. “You think I got room for this at my dump?”

“Fiona belongs with me. I'm her mother.”

“Not technically.”

“This is her home.”

“She's got her reasons.”

Delly knew what they were. Tensions had been high between her and Fiona, who resented her stepmother for a long list of routine affronts capped by, in an ultimate teenage grounding, Delly smashing the skull of her boyfriend. “I'm sorry,” she said as she knelt by Fiona's car window.

Fiona rolled it down partway. “I don't sleep good here. I'm mad at you all the time.”

“Be mad. I can take it.”

“Practically my first kiss, and you come flyin' outta the dark like a monster.”

“All true. But don't go.”

“I wanna hate you—which I hate, 'cause I know you care about me. It's why I'm goin' to Daddy's. To think. To sleep.” Fiona's face behind the car window looked twenty-five instead of fifteen, saddening her stepmother deeply. “I know what's best for me.”

“Believe me, you don't. Now please get out of the car.”

“Daddy, can we go?” Fiona rolled up the window and reached for the radio.

“Delly,” Arthur said from the other side of the car. “There's a letter inside for you. A man dropped it off.” His affected disinterest was clearly a strain.

“Did you frisk him? Get his name?”

“I would never. I want you to be happy any way you can.”

“I'm going for that divorce, Arthur. Don't care what people say.”

“I wasn't jealous,” he went on. “I knew he wasn't a rival.”

“There is no rival.”

“Almost worse. Thrown over for naught.” He tried to catch her eye. “You look pretty, by the way.”

She scowled. “So I been told.”

Arthur, by his expression, didn't like the sound of that.

*   *   *

T
HE SEALED ENVELOPE
printed with “Mrs. Franklin” was on her kitchen table.

Adele,

There is an old colored woman in Hancock Bayou in Cameron Parish whose little nephew knows it was not R. J. Bainard who died. Her name is Sally something and everyone knows her in the town. Keep it in your head. Pardon the mystery. Everything is well. I will contact you soon.

Your friend, Abe

Delly returned the note to the envelope and put it in the drawer of her bedside table. Headspun from seeing R.J. earlier and her husband just now, she didn't even try to decipher its meaning. It seemed more kooky than serious, like Abe himself.

That night she had the old nightmare again, gobs of feathers spiky in her mouth like the bodies of dead insects. Waking with a start, she lay still as her pulse slowed and her perspiration dried. She remembered that she was alone in the house, Fiona gone away. Headlights swept her window. It was nothing—people come home late all the time. But Delly got out of bed composed in the certainty that this could only be bad.

Peering out from behind her curtain, she saw a car up the street creeping forward mailbox to mailbox, a darker shape within the dark night like a shadow moving under a lake. It came to a stop three houses down and extinguished its lights. The driver emerged and looked around briefly before heading her way in a slow trot. Fear slithered down her arms.

She lost sight of the person in the darkness and crouched to the floor in certainty that he was outside her door. Seconds passed. She peeked out her window again. When the car's headlights came on she recoiled as if electrocuted—the man had looped back unseen. As he drove away, stockpiles of fright suppressed inside her all day blasted outward. She slumped against the bedroom wall and sobbed, her arms clasped over her head as if under the jeers of a hostile crowd.

The man who'd assaulted her four years ago was alive and in Lake Charles. The beast who'd put a knife to her throat last winter was likewise here. And now this strange old lawyer was passing cryptic notes saying everything was fine when it wasn't. Shaken by fear that in daylight had been bearable, she resolved to call the police right now.

But she didn't—and the reason was Seth. He was a puppy she'd dismissed with a kick. Yet he was so earnest and kind, his heart groping before him like that damn walking stick, that she told herself it would be cruel at this point to revive her charge against his brother. She'd made it through the ordeal. She'd survived. She would put her trauma behind her and let events take their course. Humility and smallness were her natural state. She wouldn't recognize herself without an unfair burden to bear.

The logic appalled her even as she embraced it; there was a lie in there somewhere that she feared to unearth. She returned to bed not even wondering who might have been casing her home after midnight. She set her mind to the different puzzle of when exactly she'd lost her mind, and fell into dreamless sleep.

*   *   *

R.J.
HAD DRIVEN
around town after encountering Delly at the hospital. By pretending not to recognize her, he'd given himself time to address the challenge she posed or to hit the road again. It wasn't a hard choice. He'd lived for years at others' discretion. No way would he do it again.

Adele Billodeau.

He remembered her. He remembered that night. Certainly he'd rushed her, especially after she'd removed her jeans and placed his hand on her pussy only to pull it away in anxious apology. She turned hysterical with self-reproach for leading him on. She couldn't breathe through her tears and said she was suffocating. He'd hit her then, a cuff on the temple to snap her to. She'd quieted, and he'd realized there was pleasure to be had, like a swift runner lapping a slow one, in asserting power over someone without it. Desire had nothing to do with it. He recalled the scene as grueling. Her body went limp once she realized what was going to happen. He pushed her knees wide and got into position. He'd needed his hand to harden himself but only a little spit to get in. He'd closed his eyes in concentration and willed himself to conclusion. His mouth against her throat had left her slick with saliva, and afterward, in the car's charged darkness, he'd dabbed her frantically with his shirt to try and make her clean again.

Sweat ran down his sides as he drove. He was sure that if the right person were beside him in the car he could have drawn his pistol and shot that person dead. He fished the weapon from under his seat. It had belonged to Freddy Baez, found in Freddy's pants with a wad of cash—blood money from Seth, no doubt—when R.J. had switched clothes in the marsh. Heeding Alvin's warning that Seth wanted him dead, he'd been keeping it handy in case. He fingered the trigger. R.J. had done it before, in Korea. A bang, a recoil, and behold the wonder you've wrought, like turning in all your cards for a new poker hand that can only be an improvement.

He was disappointed not to have been able to attend his own funeral. He wondered if seeing Freddy's ashes interred might have made the man's murder more real to him, more deplorable. R.J. owed his rebirth to an act of violence for which, truth be told, he was grateful. It's why so far he'd done nothing against Seth for hiring someone to kill him. His spirits were frankly better now. The little bastard had done him a favor.

*   *   *

H
E WAS LYING
in bed with Corinne Meers when their post-coital dialog stumbled onto matters of import. R.J. told her he'd met “someone named Delly” in Joey's hospital room. Corinne launched into details about her cousin's crumbling marriage and cracked personality that R.J. found unexpectedly compelling.

Corinne was displeased by his interest. It provoked her suspicion that “Freddy,” as she knew him, was just another horny Latin after every woman alive. He laughed off her jealousy and confessed that he wasn't a Mexican gigolo but rather was Richard Bainard, Jr.—fugitive, dead man, Block's heir, all of it. She gave a yip as if poked with a stick. “Did you really do my cousin like she said?”

“Some booze went by, but yeah. We fucked.”

“
We?
I knew it! She weren't no damn virgin.”

“That's what she said?”

“No one believed her. She had a cheap reputation.”

R.J. didn't like Corinne saying this. Judging Delly was the opposite of judging himself—nobody's right in her case, everyone's in his. “You don't look too upset about what I just told you,” he said.

“That you ain't Freddy Baez?”

“For starters.”

“My husband's gonna be a lot less mad I'm leavin' him for a Bainard instead of a Mexican.”

He absorbed this. “Glad to oblige.” She gave him a big kiss, arms around his neck, bare leg slung over his hip. He told her there were complications, namely that the wealthy scion “R. J. Bainard” was ashes in Orange Grove cemetery. “If I turn up alive, I'm back to my fugitive self. Stay dead, and I'm free and all yours—but broke.”

“Then you got to come clean, baby. 'Cause you a Bainard, and Bainards ain't broke by a damn sight.” She reached down her hand. “And you sure as hell ain't dead.”

“I do that, I go to prison.”

“Not if my cousin drops the charge, it bein' a big lie anyway.” She kissed him again. “I'll talk to her. Tell her you regret any misunderstandin'.”

“Then she'll know I'm alive. Be the end of me.”

“She knows already.”

“You think?”

“She saw you, right? At Joey's?”

“Stood two feet away.”

“Trust me. A girl don't forget.”

“She hasn't said anything, far as I know. To the cops, I mean.”

“Maybe she gonna hunt you down herself.”

“Maybe she likes me.”

“I tell her you think that, she'll kill you for sure.”

He warned her, “She's liable to hate you for even saying you know me.”

Corinne shook her head. “For hurtin' Joey she's in my debt deep. And that young fella from the hospital oughta softened her some.” She snuggled to R.J., warmed by these racy initiatives. “How bad could it a been, anyway? Lord knows I'd forgive you a roll in the backseat.”

R.J. saw no chance of gaining Delly's cooperation. It was vile, that night. He'd been drunk; her too. He'd screwed her partly to shut her up, her prattling on about high school and boys with no sense of the world's real problems. But he shouldn't have forced her, shouldn't have hit her. That more than anything else—the smack of his hand on the side of her head, the awful look of defeat in her face—made him want to scratch out his eyes to take the vision away.

“That young hospital guy?” he said at length. “Seth? He's my brother.”

Corinne sat up. “He goes by Hooker, not Bainard.”

“Even so.”

“
Your
brother, likes
my
cousin, who
you
—”

“Yes,” R.J. said.

“And we ain't even talkin' about me and Donald.”

R.J. definitely didn't want to talk about that. “I'd make it up to her if I could. Your cousin. Meet her face-to-face if she wanted.”

Corinne stopped stroking his shoulder. “That's just stupid.”

“Somewhere public. Safe, tell her.”

“Why?”

“Make my case.” He studied the bedside wall beyond where Corinne lay. “Make my regrets.”

“She'd throw a fit. Pull a gun, shoot you dead. You don't know her.”

“Be her right.”

Corinne considered. Seeking Delly's help could go a couple ways. She might run to the police. It would force R.J. to flee and Corinne to join him in penniless exile, a romantic scenario that wouldn't last a month. But if Delly could be persuaded to retract the rape charge, he could emerge from hiding, claim his fortune, and Corinne's life would really get wonderful. “I'll give it a shot,” she told R.J.

His whimsical proposition had become real. He liked that it terrified him.

Corinne asked how he'd come to take “Freddy Baez” for an alias.

“Name of a man I killed. Who's now buried under my headstone.”

If R.J. had hoped this confession would make her rethink her ardor, he was talking to the wrong person. In rapid sequence it sparked Corinne's disbelief, amusement, arousal, and dirty Chinese pictures. She dug him, was the problem; virtue wasn't a factor. And it might have worked out for her if she hadn't overestimated Delly and underestimated R.J. in terms of their moral character—and too, if she hadn't misjudged her husband's capacity for entering the story in a big way.

 

THREE

Seth, Delly, Audrey