"Can I think about it?"

Her smile got wider and she squeezed my hand.

"Well. Okay."

She hooked her arm in mine and walked me to her bedroom, but this night we made a different kind of love. We lay upon her bed, still in our clothes, and held each other until dawn.

CHAPTER 31

L ucy was driving car pool the next morning when her office called, telling her phone machine that Jo-el Boudreaux had phoned, looking for me. I picked up the phone midmessage and Darlene said, "Well, well. Fancy meeting you there."

"You'll probably be a riot in the unemployment line, too."

"Oh, we're testy in the morning." These assistants are something, aren't they? "May I speak widi Ms. Chenier?"

"She's unavailable. What did Boudreaux want?"

"There were two messages on the machine and he sounded anxious. He left a number." She gave it to me and then she hung up.

I called the number, got the Evangeline Parish Sheriff's office, Eunice Substation, and then I got Boudreaux. He said, "I can't just murder somebody. Jesus Christ. I can't do anything like that."

"All right. But doing nothing is no longer an option. So what are you going to do?"

You could hear background noise and the squeaks a chair makes when someone large shifts position.

I said, "Talk to me, Jo-el."

"Edie says you're right. She says it's time to stop hidin' from yesterday. She said that from the beginning, but I guess I was too scared to listen." He was working his way through the guilt, and not just the guilt about his wife. He'd probably seen the old man and the little girl a thousand times last night. He said, "I'm gonna arrest the sonofabitch. I should've arrested him six months ago. I should've arrested him when he came to my house with this stuff and started his blackmail."

I said, "It's the right thing, Jo-el."

"It's not just that old man. It's the whole operation. Prima. The poor bastards they been sneaking in through my parish. I can't get that little girl out of my head."

I said, "You want it to stop."

"Yes. Hell, yes. I don't want any more little girls like that. Oh, hell, yes." His voice sounded thick when he said it. "Jesus Christ, I'm just a hick cop. I don't know how to do this stuff."

"Jo-el, have you spoken with the parish prosecutor about this?"

"Unh-unh. Edie and I want to talk to the kids. We want to let'm know about us and their grandfather before they hear it in the news. I pop Rossier and he'll be screaming."

"Maybe there's a way to put this together, Jo-el."

"You mean get 'em all?"

"Maybe. Let me talk to Lucy about it. We'll need to know the legal end because we'll want to avoid entrapment, but maybe there's a way."

I hung up, then showered and dressed and was standing on the patio with the black-and-white dog when Lucy returned from car pool. She was carrying a wax-paper bag and two large containers of coffee. She offered one of the coffees. "Good morning again."

"Darlene called with a message from Jo-el Boudreaux. I'm afraid I've compromised our liaison."

"Oh, don't worry. She's used to it." These dames.

I told her about the call to Jo-el and asked her opinion. Lucy took a single plain donut from the bag and held it for me to take a bite. I did. Tender and light and still warm from the frying. Not too sugary. She took a bite after me and shook her head. "I have no experience in criminal law, Studly, but there are several ex-prosecutors at the firm."

"Think we could round one up for a quick trip to Eunice?"

She had more of the coffee and fed a small piece of the donut to the dog. "It's possible. After this donut, I'll make some calls."

"Great."

She sipped the coffee and ate a bit of the donut and stared at the camelia bushes that separated her backyard from her neighbor's. The bright morning sun painted their leaves with an emerald glow. She said, "You should tell Jodi. If it's going to come out, you should give her as much warning as possible."

"Of course."

She held out the donut again for me, but I shook my head no. She gave the remainder to the dog. "It won't be easy for you, will it?"

"You helped last night, Lucy. Thank you."

She smiled and patted my arm. "Let me make those calls."

It took about twenty minutes. A senior partner named Merhlie Comeaux agreed to drive to Eunice with Lucy and give an opinion based on his experiences both as a criminal defense attorney and the sixteen years he'd spent as an East Baton Rouge Parish prosecutor. Lucy would pick him up, and the two of them would meet Pike and me at Jo-el Boudreaux's office. I called Jo-el to see if this was agreeable, and he said that it was. He sounded nervous, but he also sounded relieved that someone who knew what they were doing was willing to advise him. When I hung up, I called Jodi Taylor at the hotel. She answered on the sixth ring, her voice puffy with sleep.

I said, "I spoke with Jo-el this morning, and I'm going to drive over there. He's going to arrest Milt Rossier."

She didn't say anything.

"I thought you should know. You want to talk about any of this?"

She said, "I wouldn't know what to say." Her voice sounded hollow, and I didn't know what to say either. She hung up. Another satisfied customer.

I called Joe Pike, told him the plan, then picked him up at the hotel and we went to Eunice.

The drive across the Atchafalaya Basin went quickly, the waterways and sugarcane fields and great industrial spiderworks now familiar. Men and women worked the fields and fished the waterways and sold burlap sacks of live crawfish for fifteen cents per pound. Some of their faces seemed familiar, but maybe that was my imagination. I tuned in to the radio evangelist to learn the topic of the day, and this morning it was the liberal plot to destroy America by breaking down the nuclear family. She said that the liberals had already accomplished this in the Negro community, but that the Negroes were getting wise, which explained the rise in popularity of the black "Musluns." She concluded, inevitably, with warnings of the coming race war, which was not part of the liberal plot but which was clear proof that the liberals were not as smart as they thought they were, since the liberals thought they could use the "blacks" to distract Christian America from their "true plan." Pike said, "Turn it off."

"Aren't you interested in learning about the 'true plan'?"

"No."

I turned it off, wondering how many of the people in the fields and on the water and in the houses were listening to this. Maybe none. Maybe Pike and I had been the only ones because everyone else had long since turned her off. Maybe, now that we had turned her off, too, she was broadcasting into dead air, just another noodle-brain with an eight-thousand-watt transmitter and nothing much to do all day except smoke cigarettes and rail into the microphone about how crummy things were, a voice alone in the dark, her signal spreading like silent ripples in a pond, unheard on the earth but traveling ever outward into space, past the moon and Mars, past the asteroids and Pluto, on into eternity. I hoped the people on Alpha Centauri were smart enough to turn her off, too.

Twenty minutes later we parked next to Lucy's Lexus outside the Eunice substation. The same woman was at the same desk, and the same pristine magnolia was in its little jar. She smiled when she saw me and said, "They're in with the sheriff. They're expecting you."

Lucy and Jo-el were sitting with a great, broad African-American man with white hair and a gut the size of a fifty-five-gallon oil drum. Merhlie Comeaux. Lucy made the introductions, then looked back at Joel. "Sheriff, before we begin this we need to establish the ground rules. Merhlie is a former EBR prosecutor, but he is now a partner in the firm of Sonnier, Melancon amp; Burke, for private hire. As such, anything said by you in this room is subject to the attorney-client privilege. Is that understood?"