82 Desire

ask.
    The woman nodded, terror starting in her eyes. What she was afraid of, Skip didn’t know. Herself, possibly.
    LaBarre returned with the towels, which Skip took from him and folded. She pressed one to each of the woman’s wrists. “Here. Hold these in place,” she said to LaBarre. “She’s going to have to be stitched.”
    The woman said, “Oh, shit, is this going to get in the paper, too?” and Skip knew what she meant.
    Skip said, “I’ll go see what’s going on with 911.”
    LaBarre said, “Can you cancel it? I can drive her to the doctor.”
    Skip shook her head. “I don’t think that’s a very good idea.”
    She went to find the woman who’d called 911—the maid, probably. The woman was moving her lips, evidently praying. She nodded at Skip. “They on the way.”
    “Mrs. LaBarre’s okay. Could you see about the child?”
    The black woman looked her in the eye: “No’m. She ain’t okay. Gon’ be a long time before she okay.” She went off shaking her head. “Melissa probably under the bed again.”
    Skip returned to the bedroom. LaBarre was still sitting there, applying pressure to his wife’s wrists. Mrs. LaBarre was sitting up with her eyes closed, tears escaping from beneath the lids.
    “They’re on the way. Everything all right?”
    Mrs. LaBarre said, “Everything will never be all right.”
    “Do you need someone to stay with you? Are you afraid of your husband?”
    The woman pointed her chin toward the ceiling as if she could stop her tears by defying gravity. “No, I’m not afraid of my husband. Go.”
    LaBarre shot Skip a helpless, pitiful look, as if an animal were dying in his arms. Skip said, “I’m sorry. I can’t go yet. I’m going to have to make a report on this.”
    She would very much have liked to go—to have let LaBarre drive his wife to the hospital and slipped quietly out. But demons had been released and there was no getting them back in their box.
    She was so damn mad at Jane Storey she felt like behaving like some cowboy in a 1940s movie—just going over and stomping her for causing trouble on the range. But such an action would have been not only highly unprofessional but quite unladylike, as Dee-Dee might have put it.
    Anyway, in some sense Jane was just doing her job—not the way Skip thought it ought to be done, but people criticized the police, too.
    The real perp had to be the tipster. How else could Jane have known about Bebe and LaBarre?
    Whole worlds were starting to fall apart. And to what end? She couldn’t banish the image of Mrs. LaBarre looking up at the ceiling, her husband holding towels to her injured wrists, the shards of their marriage almost visible around them.
    If Russell were doing the damage, it might make some sort of twisted sense, but so far, no one had indicated any instability, or even oddity on his part. Perhaps, she thought, she’d try again to talk to Edward Favret.
    ***
    She caught him about to go to lunch, but this time she wasn’t about to leave the office till he’d talked. She sat herself down and ignored his frequent glances at his watch, his anxious looks at the door. She didn’t like Favret, and this gave her a certain perverse pleasure—a sort of validation of her prejudice against white male privilege.
    No, that wasn’t it.
    Somebody had to be white, male, and privileged. Some men carried it off just fine. It was smug, self-satisfied white male privilege that rubbed her the wrong way.
    She said, taking her time, “I understand you’re Mrs. Fortier’s cousin.”
    He smiled, trying to look pleasant. “That I am.”
    “Have you heard from Russell, by any chance?”
    “Why, no.” He seemed taken aback. “Why do you ask?”
    “You must have known him at least as long as he’s been married.”
    “Oh, much longer than that. We went to Holy Name together, and then Jesuit. But then he went off to Harvard and I went to Tulane.”
    “Not Loyola?” That was often the university of choice after Jesuit.
    “We were rebels.” He shook his head, smiling in a way that she couldn’t quite identify. Perhaps it was the smile of an older and wiser man, at his own youthful indiscretions. “I introduced him and Bebe—in fact, I was their best man.”
    “And you’ve remained good friends?”
    He looked slightly uncomfortable. “Yes.”
    “You sound as if you’re not sure.”
    He shrugged. “People grow apart.”
    “Bebe says the two of you go hunting and sailing together. And play