Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

First published in the United States by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Copyright © Lou Berney 2018

Lou Berney asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

Cover photographs © Rae Russel/Getty Images (front), Shutterstock.com (back)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This is entirely a work of fiction. Any references to real people, living or dead, real events, businesses, organizations and localities are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity. All names, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and their resemblance, if any, to real-life counterparts is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780008309329

Ebook Edition © October 2018 ISBN: 9780008309367

Version: 2018-08-29

Dedication

For Adam, Jake, and Sam

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

1963

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

2003

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Read on for an exclusive Q&A …

About the Author

Also by Lou Berney

About the Publisher

1963

1

Behold! The Big Easy in all its wicked splendor!

Frank Guidry paused at the corner of Toulouse to bask in the neon furnace glow. He’d lived in New Orleans the better part of his thirty-seven years on earth, but the dirty glitter and sizzle of the French Quarter still hit his bloodstream like a drug. Yokels and locals, muggers and hustlers, fire-eaters and magicians. A go-go girl was draped over the wrought-iron rail of a second-floor balcony, one boob sprung free from her sequined negligee and swaying like a metronome to the beat of the jazz trio inside. Bass, drums, piano, tearing through “Night and Day.” But that was New Orleans for you. Even the worst band in the crummiest clip joint in the city could swing, man, swing.

A guy came whipping up the street, screaming bloody murder. Hot on his heels—a woman waving a butcher knife, screaming, too.

Guidry soft-shoed out of their way. The beat cop on the corner yawned. The juggler outside the 500 Club didn’t drop a ball. Just another Wednesday night on Bourbon Street.

“Come on, fellas!” The go-go girl on the balcony wagged her boob at a pair of drunken sailors. They stood swaying on the curb, watching their pal puke into the gutter. “Be a gent and buy a lady a drink!”

The sailors leered up at her. “How much?”

“How much you got?”

Guidry smiled. And so the world spins round. The go-go girl had black velvet kitten ears pinned to her bouffant and false eyelashes so long that Guidry didn’t know how she could see through them. Maybe that was the point.

He turned onto Bienville, easing through the crowd. He wore a gray-on-gray nailhead suit the color of wet asphalt, cut from a lightweight wool-silk blend that his tailor ordered in special from Italy. White shirt, crimson tie. No hat. If the president of the United States didn’t need a hat, then neither did Guidry.

A right on Royal. The bellhop at the Monteleone scrambled to open the door for him. “How’s tricks, Mr. Guidry?”

“Well, Tommy, I’ll tell you,” Guidry said. “I’m too old to learn any new ones, but the old ones still work just fine.”

The Carousel Bar was popping, as usual. Guidry said hello hello hello how’re you how’re you as he worked his way across the room. He shook hands and slapped backs and asked Fat Phil Lorenzo if he’d eaten dinner or just the waiter who brought it. That got a laugh. One of the boys who worked for Sam Saia hooked an arm around Guidry’s neck and whispered in his ear.

“I need to talk to you.”

“Then talk we shall,” Guidry said.

The table in the back corner. Guidry liked the view. One of life’s enduring truths: If something was after you, you wanted to see it coming first.

A waitress brought him a double Macallan, rocks on the side. Sam Saia’s boy started talking. Guidry sipped his drink and watched the action in the room. The men working the girls, the girls working the men. Smiles and lies and glances veiled by smoke. A hand sliding up under the hem of a dress, lips brushing against an ear. Guidry loved it. Everyone here looking for an angle to work, a tender spot.

“We already have the place, Frank, it’s perfect. The guy owns the building, the bar downstairs, he’ll front for peanuts. He might as well be giving it to us for free.”

“Table games,” Guidry said.

“High class all the way. A real carpet joint. But the cops won’t talk to us. We need you to smooth the way with that asshole cop Dorsey. You know how he likes his coffee.”

The art of the payoff. Guidry understood each man’s price, the right kicker to close the deal. A girl? A boy? A girl and a boy? Lieutenant Dorsey of the Eighth District, as Guidry recalled, had a wife who would appreciate a pair of diamond pendant earrings from Adler’s.

“You understand that Carlos will have to go along with it,” Guidry said.

“Carlos will go along with it if you tell him it’s a good play, Frank. We’ll give you five points for your piece.”

A redhead at the bar had her eye on Guidry. She liked his dark hair and olive skin, his lean build and dimpled chin, the Cajun slant to his green eyes. The slant was how the guineas could tell that Guidry wasn’t one of them.

“Five?” Guidry said.

“C’mon, Frank. We’re doing all the work here.”

“Then you don’t need me, do you?”

“Be reasonable.”

Guidry could see the redhead working up her nerve with every slow revolution of the merry-go-round. Her girlfriend egged her on. The padded silk back of each seat at the Carousel Bar featured a hand-painted jungle beast. Tiger, elephant, hyena.

“Oh, ‘Nature, red in tooth and claw,’” Guidry said.

“What?” Saia’s boy said.

“That’s Lord Tennyson I’m quoting, you uncultured barbarian.”

“Ten points, Frank. Best we can do.”

“Fifteen. And a look at the books whenever the mood strikes. Now, skedaddle.”

Saia’s boy glowered and seethed, but such were the rude realities of supply and demand. Lieutenant Dorsey was the hardest-headed cop in New Orleans. Only Guidry had the skill to soften him up.

He ordered another scotch. The redhead crushed out her cigarette and strolled over. She had Cleopatra eyes—the latest look—and a golden tan. She was a stewardess, maybe, home from a layover in Miami or Vegas. She sat down without asking, impressed with her own boldness.

“My girlfriend over there told me to stay away from you,” she said.

Guidry wondered how many openers she’d rehearsed in her mind before she picked the winner. “But here you are.”

“My girlfriend says you have some very interesting friends.”

“Well, I’ve plenty of dull ones, too,” Guidry said.

“She says you work for you-know-who,” she said.

“The notorious Carlos Marcello?”

“Is it true?”

“Never heard of him.”

She toyed with the cherry in her drink, making a show of it. She was nineteen, twenty years old. In a couple of years, she’d marry the biggest Uptown bank account she could find and settle down. Now, though, she wanted an adventure. Guidry was delighted to oblige.

“So aren’t you curious?” the redhead said. “Why I didn’t listen to my girlfriend and stay away from you?”

“Because you don’t like it when people tell you that you can’t have something you want,” he said.

She narrowed her eyes, as if he’d snuck a peek in her purse while she wasn’t looking. “I don’t.”

“Neither do I,” Guidry said. “We only get one ride in this life, one time around. If we don’t enjoy every minute of it, if we don’t embrace pleasure with open arms, who’s to blame for that?”

“I like to enjoy life,” she said.

“I like to hear that.”

“My name is Eileen.”

Guidry saw that Mackey Pagano had entered the bar. Gaunt and gray and unshaven, Mackey looked like he’d been living under a rock. He spotted Guidry and jerked his chin at him.

Oh, Mackey. His timing was poor. But he had an eye for opportunity and never brought in a deal that didn’t pay.

Guidry stood. “Wait here, Eileen.”

“Where are you going?” she said, surprised.

He crossed the room and gave Mackey a hug. Ye gods. Mackey smelled as bad he looked. He needed a shower and a fresh suit, without delay.

“Must have been one helluva party, Mack,” Guidry said. “Regale me.”

“I’ve got a proposition for you,” Mackey said.

“I thought you might.”

“Let’s take a walk.”

He grabbed Guidry’s elbow and steered him back out into the lobby. Past the cigar stand, down a deserted corridor, down another one.

“Are we going all the way to Cuba, Mack?” Guidry said. “I won’t look as good with a beard.”

They finally stopped, in front of the doors to the back service entrance.

“So what do you have for me?” Guidry said.

“I don’t have anything,” Mackey said.

“What?”

“I just needed to talk to you.”

“You’ve noted that I have better things to do at the moment,” Guidry said.

“I’m sorry. I’m in a bind, Frankie. I might be in a real bind.”

Guidry had a smile for every occasion. This occasion: to hide the uneasiness that began to creep over him. He gave Mackey’s shoulder a squeeze. You’ll be all right, old buddy, old pal. How bad can it be? But Guidry didn’t like the shake in Mackey’s voice, the way Mackey kept his grip tight on the sleeve of Guidry’s suit coat.

Had anyone noticed the two of them leaving the Carousel together? What if someone happened to come round that corner right now and caught them skulking? Trouble in this business had a way of spreading, just like a cold or the clap. Guidry knew you could catch it from the wrong handshake, an unlucky glance.

“I’ll come by your pad this weekend,” Guidry said. “I’ll help you sort it out.”

“I need to get it sorted out now.”

Guidry tried to ease away. “I’ve got to split. Tomorrow, Mack. Cross my heart.”

“I haven’t been back to my place in a week,” Mackey said.

“Name the spot. I’ll meet you wherever you want.”

Mackey watched him. Those hooded eyes, they seemed almost gentle in a certain light. Mackey knew that Guidry was lying about meeting tomorrow. Of course he did. Guidry came by his talent for deception naturally, but Mackey had taught him the nuances, had helped him hone and perfect his craft.

“How long have we known each other, Frankie?” Mackey said.

“I see,” Guidry said. “The sentimental approach.”

“You were sixteen years old.”

Fifteen. Guidry just off the turnip truck from Ascension Parish, Louisiana, and tumbling around the Faubourg Marigny. Living hand to mouth, stealing cans of pork and beans off the shelves of the A&P. Mackey saw promise in him and gave Guidry his first real job. Every morning for a year, Guidry had picked up the cut from the girls on St. Peter and hurried it over to Snake Gonzalez, the legendary pimp. Five dollars a day and the quick end to any romantic notions Guidry might have still had about the human species.

“Please, Frankie,” Mackey said.

“What do you want?”

“Talk to Seraphine. Get the lay of the land for me. Maybe I’m crazy.”

“What happened? Never mind. I don’t care.” Guidry wasn’t interested in the details of Mackey’s predicament. He was only interested in the details of his predicament, the one that Mackey had just created for him.

“You remember about a year ago,” Mackey said, “when I went out to ’Frisco to talk to a guy about that thing with the judge. Carlos called it all off, you remember, but—”

“Stop,” Guidry said. “I don’t care. Damn it, Mack.”

“I’m sorry, Frankie. You’re the only one I can trust. I wouldn’t ask otherwise.”

Mackey waited. Guidry tugged the knot of his tie loose. What was life but this? A series of rapid calculations: the shifting of weights, the balancing of scales. The only poor decision was a decision you allowed someone else to make for you.

“All right, all right,” Guidry said. “But I can’t put a word in for you, Mack. It’s my hide then, too. You understand that?”

“I understand,” Mackey said. “Just find out if I need to blow town. I’ll blow tonight.”

“Stay put till you hear from me.”

“I’m over on Frenchmen Street, at Darlene Monette’s place. Come by afterward. Don’t leave a message.”

“Darlene Monette?”

“She owes me one,” Mackey said. He watched Guidry with those hooded eyes. Begging. Telling Guidry, You owe me one.

“Stay put until you hear from me,” Guidry said.

“Thank you, Frankie.”

Guidry called Seraphine from a pay phone in the lobby. She didn’t answer at home, so he tried Carlos’s private office out on Airline Highway in Metairie. How many people had that number? It couldn’t have been more than a dozen. Look at me now, Ma!

“Are we not still meeting Friday, mon cher?” Seraphine said.

“We are,” Guidry said. “Can’t a fella just call to shoot the breeze?”

“My favorite pastime.”

“I caught a rumor that Uncle Carlos is looking for a penny he dropped. Our friend Mackey. Or do I have that wrong?”

Guidry heard a silky rustle. When Seraphine stretched, she arched her back like a cat. He heard the tink of a single ice cube in a glass.

“You don’t have that wrong,” she said.

Goddamn it. So Mackey’s fears were not unfounded. Carlos wanted him dead.

“Are you still there, mon cher?”

Goddamn it. Mackey had cooked Guidry dinner a thousand times. He’d introduced Guidry to the Marcello brothers. He’d vouched for Guidry when no one else in the world knew that Guidry existed.

But all that was yesterday. Guidry cared only about today, about tomorrow.

“Tell Carlos to have a look on Frenchmen Street,” Guidry said. “There’s a house with green shutters on the corner of Rampart. Darlene Monette’s place. Top floor, the flat in back.”

“Thank you, mon cher,” Seraphine said.

Guidry strolled back to the Carousel. The redhead had waited for him. He watched her for a minute from the doorway. Yea or nay, ladies and gentlemen of the jury? He liked how she’d started to wilt a bit, her Cleopatra eyeliner blurring and the flip in her hair going flat. She shook off a mope who tried to make time with her and ran a finger along the rim of her empty highball glass. Deciding to give Guidry five more minutes, that was it, no more, and this time she meant it.

He wished that it had played out differently with Mackey. He wished that Seraphine had said, You’ve heard wrong, mon cher, Carlos has no quarrel with Mackey. But now all Guidry could do was shrug. Weights and measures, simple arithmetic. Someone might have seen him with Mackey tonight. Guidry couldn’t risk it. Why would he want to?

He took the redhead back to his place. He lived fifteen floors above Canal Street, in a modern high-rise that was a sleek spike of steel and concrete, sealed off and cooled from the inside out. In the summer, when the rest of the city sweltered, Guidry didn’t break a sweat.

“Ooh,” the redhead said, “I dig it.”

The floor-to-ceiling view, the black leather sofa, the glass-and-chromium bar cart, the expensive hi-fi. She positioned herself by the window, a hand on her hip, weight on one leg to show off her curves, glancing over her shoulder the way she’d seen the models in magazines do it.

“I’m wild to live high up like this someday,” she said. “All the lights. All the stars. It’s like being in a rocket ship.”

Guidry didn’t want her to get the wrong idea, that he intended to have a conversation, so he pushed her up against the window. The glass flexed and the stars shimmied. He kissed her. The neck, the tender joint between her jaw and ear. She smelled like a cigarette butt floating in a puddle of Lanvin perfume.

Her fingers raked his hair. He grabbed her hand and pinned it behind her. With his other hand, he reached up under her skirt.

“Oh,” she said.

Satin panties. He left them on her for now and lightly, lightly traced the contours beneath, two fingers gliding over every subtle swell and crease. At the same time kissing her neck harder, letting her feel his teeth.

“Oh.” She meant it this time.

He pushed the elastic band out of the way and slid his fingers inside her. In and out, the pad of his thumb on her clit, searching for the rhythm she liked, the right amount of pressure. When he felt her breathing shift, her hips rotate, he eased off. The muscles in her neck tightened with surprise. He waited for a few seconds and then started again. Her relief was a shiver of electricity running through her body. When he eased off a second time, she gasped like she’d been kicked.

“Don’t stop,” she said.

He leaned back so he could look at her. Her eyes were glazed, her face a smear of bliss and need. “Say please.”

“Please,” she said.

“Say pretty please.”

“Please.”

He finished her. Every woman came in a different way. Eyes slitted or chin thrust out, lips parted or nostrils flared, a sigh or a snarl. Always, though, there was that one instant when the world around her ceased to exist, a white atomic flash.

“Oh, my God.” The redhead’s world pieced itself back together. “My legs are shaking.”

Weights and measures, simple arithmetic. Mackey would have made the same calculation if his and Guidry’s roles had been reversed. Mackey would have picked up the phone and made the same call that Guidry made, without question. And Guidry would have respected him for it. C’est la vie. Such was this particular life, at least.

He flipped the redhead around, hiked up her skirt, yanked down her panties. The glass flexed again when he thrust into her. Guidry’s landlord claimed the windows in the building could withstand a hurricane, but that remained to be seen.

2

Charlotte imagined herself alone on the bridge of a ship, a storm raging and the sea flinging itself over the deck. Sailcloth ripped, lines snapped. And toss in a few splintering planks for good measure, why don’t we? The sun bled a cold, colorless light that made Charlotte feel as if she had already drowned.

“Mommy,” Rosemary called from the living room, “Joan and I have a question.”

“I told you to come eat breakfast, chickadees,” Charlotte said.

“September is your favorite month of autumn, isn’t it, Mommy? And November is your least favorite?”

“Come eat breakfast.”

The bacon was burning. Charlotte tripped on the dog, sprawled in the middle of the floor, and lost her shoe. On the way back across the kitchen—the toaster had begun to smoke now, too—she tripped on the shoe. The dog twitched and grimaced, a seizure approaching. Charlotte prayed for a false alarm.

Plates. Forks. Charlotte put on lipstick with one hand as she poured juice with the other. It was already half past seven. Where did the time go? Anywhere but here, apparently.

“Girls!” she called.

Dooley shuffled into the kitchen, still in his pajamas, with the greenish tint and martyred posture of an El Greco saint.

“You’re going to be late for work again, honey,” Charlotte said.

He sagged into a chair. “I feel awful puny this morning.”

Charlotte supposed that he did. It had been after one in the morning when she heard the front door finally bang open, when she heard him come bumping and weaving down the hallway. He’d taken off his pants before he came to bed but had been too drunk to remember his sport coat. As drunk as usual, in other words.

“Would you like some coffee?” Charlotte said. “I’ll make you some toast.”

“Might be the flu, I’m thinking.”

She admired her husband’s ability to keep a straight face. Or maybe he really believed his own lies? He was a trusting soul, after all.

He took a sip of the coffee and then shuffled back out of the kitchen, into the bathroom. She heard him retch, then rinse.

The girls climbed into their seats at the table. Rosemary, seven, and Joan, eight. To look at them, you’d never guess that they were sisters. Joan’s little blond head was always as sleek and shiny as the head of a pin. Meanwhile several tendrils of Rosemary’s unruly chestnut hair had already sprung free from the tortoiseshell band. An hour from now, she’d look as if she’d been raised by wolves.

“But I like November,” Joan said.

“No, Joan, see, September is best because that’s the one month every year when we’re the same age,” Rosemary said. “And October has Halloween. Halloween is better than Thanksgiving, of course. So November has to be your least favorite month of autumn.”

“Okay,” Joan said. She was ever agreeable. A good thing, with a little sister like Rosemary.

Charlotte searched for her purse. She’d had it in her hand a moment ago. Hadn’t she? She heard Dooley retch again, rinse again. The dog had flopped over and then settled. According to the veterinarian, the new medicine might reduce the frequency of the seizures or it might not. They would have to wait and see.

She found her lost shoe beneath the dog. She had to pry it out from beneath the thick, heavy folds of him.

“Poor Daddy,” Rosemary said. “Is he under the weather again?”

“You could certainly say that,” Charlotte conceded. “Yes.”

Dooley returned from the bathroom, looking less green but more martyred.

“Daddy!” the girls said.

He winced. “Shhh. My head.”

“Daddy, Joan and I agree that September is our favorite month of autumn and November is our least favorite month. Do you want us to explain why?”

“Unless it snows in November,” Joan said.

“Oh, yes!” Rosemary said. “If it snows, then it’s the best month. Joan, let’s pretend it’s snowing now. Let’s pretend the wind is howling and the snow is melting down our necks.”

“Okay,” Joan said.

Charlotte set the toast in front of Dooley and gave each girl a kiss on the top of the head. Her love for her daughters defied understanding. Sometimes the sudden, unexpected detonation of it shook Charlotte from head to toe.

“Charlie, I wouldn’t mind a fried egg,” Dooley said.

“You don’t want to be late for work again, honey.”

“Oh, hell. Pete doesn’t mind when I come in. I might call in sick today anyway.”

Pete Winemiller owned the hardware store in town. A friend of Dooley’s father, Pete was the latest in a long line of friends and clients who’d done the old man a favor and hired his wayward son. And the latest in a long line of employers whose patience with Dooley had been quickly exhausted.

But Charlotte had to proceed with caution. She’d learned early in the marriage that the wrong word or tone of voice or poorly timed frown could send Dooley into a wounded sulk that might last for hours.

“Didn’t Pete say last week that he needed you bright and early every day?” she said.

“Oh, don’t worry about Pete. He’s full of gas.”

“But I bet he’s counting on you. Maybe if you just—”

“Lord Almighty, Charlie,” Dooley said. “I’m a sick man. Can’t you see that? You’re trying to wring blood from a stone.”

If only dealing with Dooley were so simple or so easy as that. Charlotte hesitated and then turned away. “All right,” she said. “I’ll fry you an egg.”

“I’m going to lie down on the couch for a minute. Holler at me when it’s ready.”

She watched him exit. Where did the time go? Only a moment ago, Charlotte had been eleven years old, not twenty-eight. Only a moment ago, she’d been barefoot and baked brown by the long prairie summer, racing through swishing bluestem and switchgrass as tall as her waist, leaping from the high bank of the Redbud River, cannonballing into the water. Parents always warned their children to stay in the shallows, on the town side of the river, but Charlotte had been the strongest swimmer of any her friends, undaunted by the current, and she could make it to the far shore, to parts unknown, with hardly any trouble at all.

Charlotte remembered lying sprawled in the sun afterward, daydreaming about skyscrapers in New York City and movie premieres in Hollywood and jeeps on the African savanna, wondering which of many delightful and exotic futures awaited her. Anything was possible. Everything was possible.

She reached for Joan’s plate and knocked over her juice. The glass hit the floor and shattered. The dog began to jerk and grimace again, more forcefully this time.

“Mommy?” Rosemary said. “Are you crying or laughing?”

Charlotte knelt to stroke the dog’s head. With her other hand, she collected the sharp, sparkling shards of the juice glass.

“Well, sweetie,” she said, “I think maybe both.”

SHE FINALLY MADE IT DOWNTOWN AT A QUARTER PAST EIGHT. “Downtown” was far too grand a designation. Three blocks square, a handful of redbrick buildings with Victorian cupolas and rough-faced limestone trim, not one of them more than three stories tall. A diner, a dress shop, a hardware store, a bakery. The First (and only) Bank of Woodrow, Oklahoma.

The photography studio was on the corner of Main and Oklahoma, next to the bakery. Charlotte had worked there for almost five years now. Mr. Hotchkiss specialized in formal portraits. Beaming brides-to-be, toddlers in starched sailor suits, freshly delivered infants. Charlotte mixed the darkroom chemicals, processed the film, printed the contact sheets, and tinted the black-and-white portraits. For hour after tedious hour, she sat at her table, using linseed oil and paint to add a golden glow to hair, a blue gleam to irises.

She lit a cigarette and started in on the Richardson toddlers, a pair of identical twins with matching Santa hats and stunned expressions.

Mr. Hotchkiss puttered over and bent down to examine her work. A widower in his sixties, he smelled of apple-flavored pipe tobacco and photochemical fixative. He tended, as preface to any important pronouncement, to hitch up his pants.

He hitched up his pants. “Well, all right.”

“Thank you,” Charlotte said. “I couldn’t decide on the shade of red for the hats. The debate with myself grew heated.”

Mr. Hotchkiss glanced at her transistor radio on the shelf. The AM station that she liked broadcast from Kansas City, so by the time the signal reached Woodrow, it had gone fuzzy and ragged. Even after Charlotte had done much fiddling with the dial and the antenna, Bob Dylan still sounded as if he was singing “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” from the bottom of a well.

“I’ll tell you what, Charlie,” Mr. Hotchkiss said. “That old boy’s no Bobby Vinton.”

“I fully agree,” Charlotte said.

“Mumble, mumble, mumble. I don’t understand a thing he’s saying.”

“The world is changing, Mr. Hotchkiss. It’s speaking a new language.”

“Not here in Logan County it’s not,” he said, “thank goodness.”

No, not here in Logan County. On that fact Charlotte stood corrected.

“Mr. Hotchkiss,” she said, “have you had a chance yet to look at that new photo I gave you?”

In addition to his duties at the studio, Mr. Hotchkiss served as photo editor for the local newspaper, the Woodrow Trumpet. Charlotte coveted one of the freelance assignments. Several months ago she’d persuaded Mr. Hotchkiss to loan her one of his lesser cameras.

Her early attempts at photography had been woeful. She’d kept at it, though. She practiced on her lunch hour, if she had a few minutes between errands, and early in the morning before the girls woke. When she took the girls to the library on Saturday, she studied magazines and art books. Taking pictures, thinking about the world from a perspective she otherwise wouldn’t have considered, made her feel the way she did when she listened to Bob Dylan and Ruth Brown—bright and vital, as if her small life were, just for a moment, part of something larger.

“Mr. Hotchkiss?” she said.

He’d been distracted by the morning mail. “Hmm?” he said.

“I asked if you’d had a chance yet to look at my new photo.”

He hitched up his pants and cleared his throat. “Ah, yes. Well. Yes.”

The photo she’d given him was of Alice Hibbard and Christine Kuriger, waiting to cross Oklahoma Avenue at the end of the day. The backlight, the contrast … what had caught Charlotte’s eye was how their shadows seemed more substantial, almost more real, than the two women themselves.

“And what did you think?” Charlotte said.

“Well. Have I explained the rule of thirds?”

Only a few dozen times. “Yes, I understand,” she said. “But in this case I was trying to capture the—”

“Charlotte,” he said. “Dear. You’re a lovely, smart girl, and I’m lucky to have you. The girl I had before you … well. All thumbs and not a brain in her head, bless her heart. I don’t know what I’d do without you, Charlie.”

He patted her shoulder. She was tempted to present an ultimatum. Either he gave her a chance with the Trumpet—she’d take any assignment, no matter how lowly—or he’d find out exactly what he would do without her.

Did she have any talent as a photographer? Charlotte wasn’t sure but thought she might. She knew the difference between an interesting picture and a dull one at least. She knew the difference between the photos in Life and National Geographic that seemed to leap off the page and the ones in the Trumpet that sprawled like corpses on a slab.

“Mr. Hotchkiss,” she said.

He’d turned and started to putter away. “Hmm?”

But of course she couldn’t afford to quit the studio. The money she brought home every week kept the ship afloat. And perhaps Mr. Hotchkiss was right and Charlotte was all thumbs when it came to photography. He was a professional, after all, with a framed certificate of merit from the Oklahoma Society of Professional Journalists. He might be doing Charlotte a favor. Thank goodness, she might say years from now, looking back. Thank goodness I didn’t waste any more time on that.

“Nothing,” she told Mr. Hotchkiss. “Never mind.”

She returned to work on the Richardson toddlers. Their parents were Harold and Virginia. Harold’s sister Beanie had been Charlotte’s best friend in grade school. His father had been Charlotte’s choir director in junior high. His mother loved pineapple upside-down cake, and every year Charlotte made sure to bake one for her birthday.

Virginia Richardson (née Norton) had worked with Charlotte on the high-school yearbook. She’d insisted that Charlotte double-check the spelling of every caption she wrote. Bob, Virginia’s older brother, had been a dashingly handsome varsity star in track, baseball, and football. He was married now to Hope Kirby, who a year after graduation had blossomed from ugly duckling to beautiful swan. Hope Kirby’s mother, Irene, had been Charlotte’s mother’s maid of honor.

Charlotte had known them all her life, the Richardsons and the Nortons and the Kirbys. She’d known everyone in town all her life, she realized. And everyone in town had known her. Always would.

Was it selfish of her, she wondered, to want more from her life? To want more for Rosemary and Joan? Woodrow was idyllic in many ways. Quaint, safe, friendly. But it was also interminably dull, as locked in its stubborn, small-minded ways, as resistant to new things and ideas, as Mr. Hotchkiss. Charlotte longed to live in a place where it wasn’t so hard to tell the past from the future.

A few months ago, she’d suggested to Dooley that they consider moving away—to Kansas City, maybe, or to Chicago. Dooley had stared at her dumbfounded, as if she’d suggested that they strip off their clothes and run screaming through the streets.

Today, on her lunch hour, Charlotte had no time for photography. She wolfed her sandwich, picked up the dog’s medicine at the vet, and then hurried down the street to the bank. Dooley had promised to talk to Jim Feeney this time, but no one was more adept at evading unpleasant tasks than her husband. Charlotte, unfortunately, couldn’t afford the luxury.

“Oh, darn, did I forget?” Dooley would say, his smile bashful without being apologetic, a little boy who’d gotten away with much in his life and become accustomed to it.

At the bank Charlotte had to sit and wait until Jim Feeney finished a phone call.

Little Jimmy Feeney. He and Charlotte had been in the same class since kindergarten. In grade school he’d been held back a year because arithmetic eluded him. In high school he’d broken his arm while attempting to tip a cow. Yet there he sat, behind the assistant manager’s desk, because he was a man. And here she sat, on the other side of the desk, because she was not.

“Hello, Charlie,” he said. “What may I help you with today?”

What indeed? Charlotte wondered if Jim relished her mortification or was just oblivious to it.

“Hello, Jim,” she said. “I’m afraid I have to ask for an extension on our mortgage payment this month.”

“I see.”

Bonnie Bublitz observed them from the teller cage. So did Vernon Phipps, cashing a check. Hope Norton (née Kirby) fluttered past and then fluttered back to hand Jim a folder.

I won’t beg, Charlotte thought, as she prepared to do just that.

“We just need a short extension, Jim,” she said. “A week or two.”

“This puts me in a spot, Charlie,” he said.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’d be the third extension this year, you know.”

“I do know. Things have been a bit tight lately. But they’re looking up.”

Jim drummed his fountain pen against the edge of his ledger. Thinking, or coming as near to it as he was able.

“You have to pinch every penny, Charlie,” he said, even though he knew Dooley, even though he knew full well the real source of their financial difficulties. “A detailed budget can be very useful. Household expenses and such.”

“Just an extra two weeks,” Charlotte said. “Please, Jim.”

His drumming trailed away. Da-da-da, da-da, da. Like a fading heartbeat. “Well, I suppose I can give you one more …”

Earl Grindle stepped out of the manager’s office. He looked wildly around, as if he couldn’t fathom why everyone else in the bank continued to sit or stand calmly.

He took off his glasses and then put them back on. “Someone shot him. Someone shot President Kennedy.”

CHARLOTTE WALKED BACK TO THE PHOTOGRAPHY STUDIO. Mr. Hotchkiss had not learned the news about the president yet. She peeked into the darkroom and saw him tinkering, blissfully ignorant, with the lamphouse of the Beseler enlarger.

She sat down at her table and started tinting a new portrait. The Moore baby, three months old. He was propped on a carnation-shaped swirl of satin that, Charlotte decided, required a subtle shade of ivory.

The president had been shot. Charlotte wasn’t sure if she’d truly grasped that yet. At the bank she’d watched as Hope Norton dropped her armful of folders. As Bonnie Bublitz in the teller cage burst into tears. As Vernon Phipps had walked out of the bank in a trance, leaving behind on the counter a stack of five-dollar bills. Jimmy Feeney kept asking, “Is this a joke? Earl, is this some kind of a joke?”

The smell of linseed oil and apple-flavored pipe tobacco. The hum and chuckle of the radiator. Charlotte worked. She continued to remain curiously unmoved, curiously removed, by the news from Dallas. For a moment she couldn’t remember what day of the week it was, or what year. It could have been any day, any year.

The phone rang. She heard Mr. Hotchkiss walk to his office and answer it.

“What’s that?” he said. “What? Oh, no! Oh, no!”

The parents of the Moore baby, their third, were Tim and Ann Moore. Charlotte’s first babysitting job had been for Tim’s pack of younger brothers. Ann’s sister was none other than Hope Norton, who was married to Virginia Richardson’s older brother, Bob. And yes, yet another link in the chain: Ann’s cousin on her mother’s side was Dooley’s boss at the hardware store, Pete Winemiller.

“Oh, no,” she heard Mr. Hotchkiss say. “I don’t believe it.”

The president had been shot. Charlotte could understand why people were shocked and upset. They feared an uncertain future. They worried that their lives would never be the same.

And maybe their lives wouldn’t be the same. But Charlotte knew that her life would remain undisturbed, her future—and the future of her daughters—certain. A bullet fired hundreds of miles away didn’t change that.

She dipped her brush and stroked rosy pink life into the Moore baby’s black-and-white cheek. Her favorite movie, as a child, had been The Wizard of Oz, her favorite moment when Dorothy opened the door of her black-and-white farmhouse and stepped into a strange and wonderful land.

Lucky Dorothy. Charlotte dipped her brush again and not for the first time imagined a tornado dropping from the sky and blowing her far away, into a world full of color.

3

Sunlight slid over Guidry, and the dream he’d been having jerked and blurred like film jumping off the sprockets of a movie projector. Five seconds later he couldn’t remember much about the dream. A bridge. A house in the middle of the bridge, where no house should be. Guidry had been standing at a window of the house, or maybe he was on a balcony, peering down at the water and trying to spot a ripple.

He flopped out of bed, his head as huge and tender as a rotten pumpkin. Aspirin. Two glasses of water. He was prepared, now, to pull on his pants and negotiate the hallway. Art Pepper. That was Guidry’s favorite cure for a hangover. He slid Smack Up from the cardboard sleeve and placed it on the turntable. “How Can You Lose” was his favorite tune on the album. He felt better already.

It was two o’clock in the afternoon, or what residents of the French Quarter called the crack of dawn. Guidry made a pot of scalding-hot coffee and filled two mugs, topping off his with a healthy shot of Macallan. Scotch was his other favorite cure for a hangover. He took a swallow and listened to Pepper’s saxophone weaving in and out of the melody like a dog dodging traffic.

The redhead was still knocked out, the sheet on her side of the bed kicked away and one arm flung over her head. But wait a second. She was a brunette now, no longer a redhead. Fuller lips, no freckles. How had that happened? He remained perplexed—was he still dreaming?—until he remembered that today was Friday, not Thursday, and the redhead had been the night before last.

Too bad. He could’ve dined out on that story for weeks, how he was so good in the sack that he’d banged the freckles right off a girl.

Jane? Jennifer? Guidry had forgotten the brunette’s name. She worked for TWA. Or maybe that had been the redhead before her. Julia?

“Rise and shine, sunshine,” he said.

She turned to him with a sleepy smile, her lipstick flaking off. “What time is it?”

He handed her a mug. “Time for you to beat it.”

In the shower he lathered up and planned his day. Seraphine first, find out what she had for him. After that he’d get started on the deal that Sam Saia’s boy had brought him at the Carousel the other night. Was Saia’s boy steady? Everything Guidry had heard about him said so, but better to ask around and make sure before he committed himself.

What else? Pop into the bar across from the courthouse to buy a few rounds and soak up the scuttlebutt. Dinner with Al LaBruzzo, God help us all. LaBruzzo had his heart set on buying a go-go joint. Guidry would have to handle him delicately—he was Sam’s brother, and Sam was Carlos’s driver. By the end of dinner, Guidry would have to convince Al to convince himself that no, no, he didn’t want Guidry’s money after all, would refuse even if Guidry got down on his knees and begged him to take it.

Guidry shaved, trimmed his nails, browsed the closet. He picked a brown windowpane suit with slim notched lapels and a Continental cut. Cream-colored shirt, green tie. Green tie? No. Thanksgiving was less than a week away, and he wanted to get into the spirit of the season. He swapped the green tie for one the deep, dusty orange of an autumn sunset.

When he stepped into the living room, he saw that the brunette was still there. She was curled up on the sofa—not even dressed yet, ye gods—watching the television.

He went over to the window and found her skirt and her blouse on the floor where they’d fallen the night before, her bra hanging on the bar cart. He tossed the clothes at her.

“One Mississippi,” he said. “Two Mississippi. I’ll give you till five.”

“He’s gone.” She didn’t even look at Guidry. “I can’t believe it.”

Guidry realized that she was crying. “Who?”

“They shot him,” she said.

“Shot who?”

He looked over at the TV. On the screen a newscaster sat behind a desk, taking a deep drag off his cigarette. He looked limp and dazed, as if someone had just dumped a bucket of cold water on him.

“The motorcade had just passed the Texas School Book Depository in downtown Dallas,” the newscaster said. “Senator Ralph Yarborough told our reporter that he was riding three cars behind the president’s car when he heard the three distinct rifle shots.”

The president of what? That was Guidry’s first thought. The president of some oil company? Of some jungle republic that no one had ever heard of? He didn’t understand why the brunette was so broken up about it.

And then it clicked. He lowered himself next to her and watched the newscaster read from a sheet of paper. A sniper had fired from the sixth floor of a building in Dealey Plaza. Kennedy, riding in the backseat of a Lincoln Continental convertible, had been hit. They’d taken him to Parkland Hospital. A priest had administered last rites. At 1:30 P.M., an hour and a half ago, the doctors had pronounced the president dead.

The sniper, the newscaster said, was in custody. Some mope who worked at the School Book Depository.

“I can’t believe it,” the brunette said. “I can’t believe he’s gone.”

For a second, Guidry didn’t move. Didn’t breathe. The brunette reached for his hand and squeezed. She thought he couldn’t believe it either, that a bullet had blown the top off Jack Kennedy’s head.

“Get dressed.” Guidry stood, pulled her to her feet. “Get dressed and get out.”

She just stared at him, so he wrestled her arm into the sleeve of the blouse. Forget the bra. He would have tossed her naked out the front door if he weren’t worried she’d make a scene or go bawling to the cops.

Her other arm now, dead and rubbery. She’d begun to sob. He told himself to cool it, cool it. Guidry had a reputation around town: the man who never rattled, no matter how hard you shook him. So don’t start now, brother.

“Sunshine.” He stroked her cheek with the back of his hand. “I’m sorry. I can’t believe it either. I can’t believe he’s gone.”

“I know,” she said. “I know.”

She didn’t know anything. The newscaster on TV was explaining that Dealey Plaza in Dallas was between Houston, Elm, and Commerce Streets. Guidry knew where the fuck it was. He’d been there a week ago, dropping a sky-blue ’59 Cadillac Eldorado in a parking garage two blocks away on Commerce.

Seraphine didn’t usually ask him to do that sort of work. It was below his current exalted station, as it were. But since Guidry was already in town, to wine and dine and soothe the nerves of a jittery deputy chief who Carlos needed to keep on the pad … why not? Sure, I don’t mind, all for one and one for all.

Oh, by the way, mon cher, I have a small errand for you when you’re in Dallas …

Oh, shit, oh, shit. A getaway switch car was standard procedure for a lot of Carlos’s high-profile hits. After the gunman finished the job, he would beeline it to the car stashed nearby and hit the road in a clean set of wheels.

When Guidry parked the sky-blue Eldorado two blocks from Dealey Plaza, he’d assumed a dark future for some unlucky soul—a lay-off bookie whose numbers didn’t tally or the jittery deputy chief if Guidry’s soothing didn’t work.

But the president of the United States …

“Go home,” he told the brunette. “All right? Freshen up, and then let’s … What do you want to do? Neither of us, we shouldn’t be alone right now.”

“No,” she agreed. “I want to … I don’t know. We could just …”

“Go home and freshen up, and then we’ll have a nice lunch,” he said. “All right? What’s your address? I’ll pick you up in an hour. After lunch we’ll find a church and light a candle for his soul.”

Guidry nodding at her until she nodded back. Helping her step into her skirt, looking around for her shoes.

Maybe it was just a coincidence, he told himself, that he’d stashed a getaway car two blocks from Dealey Plaza. Maybe it was just a coincidence that Carlos despised the Kennedy brothers more than any other two human beings on earth. Jack and Bobby had dragged Carlos in front of the Senate and pissed on his leg in front of the whole country. A couple of years after that, they’d tried to deport him to Guatemala.

Maybe Carlos had forgiven and forgotten. Sure. And maybe some mope who lugged boxes of books around a warehouse for a living could make a rifle shot like that—six floors up, a moving target, a breeze, trees in the way.

Guidry eased the brunette onto the elevator, off the elevator, through the lobby of his building, into the back of a cab. He had to snap his fingers at the hack, who was bent over his radio listening to the news and hadn’t even noticed them.

“Go home and freshen up.” Guidry gave the brunette a kiss on the cheek. “I’ll pick you up in an hour.”

In the Quarter, grown men stood on the sidewalk and wept. Women wandered down the street as if they’d been struck blind. A Lucky Dog vendor shared his radio with a shoeshine boy. When in the history of civilization had that happened before? They shall beat their swords into plowshares. The leopard will lie down with the goat.

Guidry had fifteen minutes to spare, so he ducked into Gaspar’s. He’d never been inside during the day. With the house lights on, it was a gloomy joint. You could see the stains on the floor, the stains on the ceiling, the velvet stage curtain patched with electrical tape.

A group was huddled by the bar, people like Guidry who’d been drawn inside by the blue throb of the TV. A newscaster—a different one than before, just as dazed—read a statement from Johnson. President Johnson now.

“I know that the world shares the sorrow that Mrs. Kennedy and her family bear,” Johnson said. “I will do my best. That is all I can do. I ask for your help—and God’s.”

The bartender poured shots of whiskey, on the house. The lady next to Guidry, a proper little Garden District widow, ancient as time and frail as a snowflake, picked up a drink and knocked it back.

On TV they cut to the Dallas police station. Cops in suits and white cowboy hats, reporters, gawkers, everybody pushing and shoving. There was the mope, in the middle of it all, getting bounced around. A little guy, rat-faced, one of his eyes swollen shut. Lee Harvey Oswald, the announcer said his name was. He looked groggy and bewildered, like a kid who’d been dragged out of bed in the dead of night and hoped that all this might be just a nightmare.

A reporter shouted a question that Guidry couldn’t make out as the cops shoved Oswald into a room. Another reporter moved into the frame, speaking to the camera.

“He says he has nothing against anybody,” the reporter said, “and has not committed any act of violence.”

The Garden District widow downed a second shot of whiskey. She looked furious enough to spit. “How could this happen?” she kept muttering to herself. “How could this happen?”

Guidry couldn’t say for sure, but he had an educated opinion. A professional sharpshooter, an independent contractor brought in by Carlos. Positioned on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, or on the floor below to put a frame on Oswald, or maybe set up on the other side of the plaza, an elevated spot away from the crowds. After the real sniper made his shot, he wrapped up his rifle and strolled down Commerce Street to the sky-blue Eldorado waiting for him.

Guidry left Gaspar’s and headed to Jackson Square. A priest comforted his flock on the steps of the cathedral. A time to plant, a time to pluck up what has been planted. The usual jive.

Guidry was walking too fast. Cool it, brother.

If the cops hooked Carlos’s sharpshooter and connected him to the Eldorado, they’d be able to connect the Eldorado to Guidry. Guidry had picked up the car from a supermarket parking lot in the colored part of Dallas. Door left unlocked for him, keys under the visor. Guidry’s prints weren’t on the car—he wasn’t stupid, he’d worn his driving gloves—but someone might remember him. A sky-blue Cadillac Eldorado, a white man in the colored part of town. Someone would remember him.

Because this wasn’t just another ho-hum murder, some shoe-leather wiseguy popped in a back alley, the detectives and the prosecutor already snug in Carlos’s pocket. This was the president of the United States. Bobby Kennedy and the FBI wouldn’t stop until they’d turned over every goddamn rock.

A sticky drizzle blew away, and the sun poked through the clouds. Seraphine stood next to the statue of Old Hickory. The horse rearing, Andrew Jackson tipping his hat. The shadow from the statue split Seraphine in half. She smiled at Guidry, one eye bright and liquid and playful, the other a dark green stone.

He wanted to grab her and shove her up against the base of the statue and demand to know why she’d stuck him right in the middle of this, the crime of the century. Instead, wisely, he smiled back. With Seraphine you had to proceed with caution, or else you didn’t proceed for long.

“Hello, little boy,” she said. “The forest is dark and the wolves howl. Hold my hand and I’ll help you find your way home.”

“I’ll take my chances with the wolves, thanks,” Guidry said.

She pouted. Is that what you think of me? And then she laughed. Of course it was what he thought of her. Guidry would be a fool if he didn’t.

“I adore autumn,” she said. “Don’t you? The air so crisp. The scent of melancholy. Autumn tells us the truth about the world.”

You wouldn’t call Seraphine pretty. Regal. With a high, broad forehead and a dramatic arch to her nose, dark hair marcelled and parted on the side. Skin just a shade darker than Guidry’s own. Anywhere but New Orleans, she might have passed for white.

She dressed as primly as a schoolteacher. Today she wore a mohair sweater set and a slim-fitting skirt, pristine white gloves. Her own private joke, maybe. She always seemed to be smiling at one.

“Cut the bullshit,” Guidry said. With the right smile, he could say things like that to her. To Carlos, even.

She smiled and smoked. One of the skeletal carriage horses on Decatur Street whinnied, shrill and disconsolate, almost a scream. A sound you wanted to forget the minute you heard it.

“So you’ve seen the news about the president,” she said.

“Imagine my alarm,” he said.

“Don’t worry, mon cher. Come, I’ll buy you a drink.”

“Just one?”

“Come.”

They walked over to Chartres. The Napoleon House didn’t open for another hour. The bartender let them in, poured their drinks, disappeared.

“Goddamn it, Seraphine,” Guidry said.

“I understand your concern,” she said.

“I hope you’re planning to visit me in prison.”

“Don’t worry.”

“Say it again and maybe I’ll start to believe you.”

She flicked the ash from her cigarette with a languid sweep of a gloved hand.

“My father used to work here,” she said. “Did you know? Mopping the floors, cleaning the toilets. When I was a little girl, he brought me with him occasionally. Do you see those?”

The walls of the Napoleon House hadn’t been replastered in a century, and every one of the antique oil portraits hung just a little bit crooked. Mean, haughty faces, glaring down from the shadows.

“When I was a little girl,” she said, “I was convinced that the people in the paintings were watching me. Waiting until I blinked so that they could pounce.”

“Maybe they were,” Guidry said. “Maybe they worked for J. Edgar Hoover.”

“I’ll say it once more, because we’re such old friends. Don’t worry. The authorities have their man, don’t they?”

“It’s just the cops in Dallas, and they only think they have their man.”

Guidry knew that the FBI would never buy Oswald, not for a minute. C’mon. They’d start digging, and he’d start gabbing. No. Check that. The feds were already digging, and Oswald was already gabbing.

“He won’t be a problem,” Seraphine said.

Oswald. That little rat face, vaguely familiar. Guidry thought he might have seen him around town at some point. “So you can tell the future now?” he said.

“His.”

“Where’s the Eldorado?” Guidry said. Seraphine could reassure him till she was blue in the face, but he wouldn’t be safe from the feds until that car disappeared forever. The Eldorado was the one piece of physical evidence that linked him to the assassination.

“On its way to Houston,” she said, “as we speak.”

“If your fella with the eagle eye gets pulled over by the cops …”

“He won’t.” Her smile a bit less serene this time. The Eldorado was also the one piece of physical evidence that linked Carlos to the assassination.

“And once the car’s in Houston?” Guidry said.

“Someone trustworthy will send it to the bottom of the sea.”

Guidry reached over the bar for the bottle of scotch. He felt better, a little. “Is that true?” he said. “About your father working here?”

She shrugged. The shrug meant, Yes, of course. Or it meant, No, don’t be absurd.

“Who’s dumping the car in Houston?” Guidry said. “Your fella who’s driving it down?”

“No. He’s needed elsewhere.”

“So who, then?” Guidry, from his elevated perch in the organization, just a branch or two below Seraphine, knew most of Carlos’s guys. Some were more reliable than others. “Whoever dumps it, you better be damn sure you can count on him.”

“But of course,” she said. “Uncle Carlos has complete faith in this man. Never once has he failed us.”

Who? Guidry started to ask again. Instead he turned to stare at her. “Me?” he said. “No. I’m not going near that fucking car.”

“No?”

“I’m not going near that fucking car, Seraphine.” Guidry remembered to smile this time. “Not now, not a hundred years from now.”

She shrugged again. “But, mon cher,” she said, “in this matter who can we trust more than you? Who can you trust more?”

Only now did Guidry complete the arduous climb to the summit and, panting with exertion, realize just where Seraphine had led him. It had been her plan all along, he realized. Have Guidry stash the getaway Eldorado before the hit so that he’d be thoroughly motivated—his own ass on the line now—to get rid of the car afterward.

“Goddamn it,” he said. But you had to admire the dazzling footwork, the elegance of the maneuver. Who needed to tell the future when you could create it yourself?

Out on the street, Seraphine handed him a plane ticket.

“Your flight to Houston leaves tomorrow,” she said. “You’ll have to miss your Saturday-morning cartoons, I’m afraid. The car will be left for you downtown, in a pay lot across the street from the Rice Hotel.”

“What then?” he said.

“There’s a decommissioned-tank terminal on the ship channel. Take La Porte Road east. Keep going after you pass the Humble Oil refinery. You’ll see an unmarked road about a mile on.”

What if the feds had already found the Eldorado? They’d sit on it, of course. They’d wait for some poor idiot to show up and claim it.

“In the evening you’ll have all the privacy you need,” she said. “The ship channel is forty feet deep. Afterward walk half a mile up La Porte. There’s a filling station with a phone. You can call a cab from there. And me.”

She kissed him on the cheek. Her expensive scent, over the years, had never changed: fresh jasmine and what smelled like the scorched spices at the bottom of a cast-iron pan. She and Guidry had been lovers once, but so briefly and so long ago that he remembered that period only occasionally, and without much feeling about it one way or another. He doubted that Seraphine remembered it at all.

“You and Carlos never miss a button, do you?” Guidry said.

“So you see now, mon cher? Don’t worry.”

As Guidry walked back through the Quarter, Seraphine’s scent faded and his mind worked. It was true that Seraphine and Carlos never missed a button. But what if Guidry was one of those buttons? What if he was worried about the feds when in fact the real danger—Carlos, Seraphine—stood smiling right behind him?

Get rid of the Eldorado.

And then get rid of the man who got rid of the Eldorado. Get rid of the man who knows about Dallas.

The priest on the steps of St. Louis was still going strong. He was just a kid, barely out of the seminary, pudgy and apple-cheeked. He clasped his hands in front of him, like he was about to blow on the dice in hopes of a lucky roll.

“When we pass through the waters, God will be with us,” the priest was assuring his congregation. “When we walk through the fire, we shall not be burned.”

That wasn’t Guidry’s experience. He listened to the priest for another minute and then turned away.

4

Barone got the call at nine. He was ready for it. Seraphine told him to meet her at Kolb’s for dinner in half an hour, don’t be late.

Bitch. “When have I ever been late?” Barone said.

“I’m teasing, mon cher,” Seraphine said.

“Tell me. When have I ever been late?”

Kolb’s was the German restaurant on St. Charles Avenue, just off Canal Street. Dark-paneled walls and beer steins and platters of schnitzel with pickled beets. Carlos was Italian, but he loved German food. He loved every kind of food. Barone had never seen anyone in New Orleans pack it away like Carlos.

“Sit down,” Carlos said. “You want something to eat?”

The place was almost deserted, everyone at home watching the big news. “No,” Barone said.

“Have something to eat,” Carlos said.

The ceiling at Kolb’s was fitted with a system of fans connected by squeaking, creaking leather belts. A little wooden man in lederhosen turned a crank to keep the belts and the fans moving.

“His name is Ludwig,” Seraphine said. “Tireless and reliable, just like you.”

She smiled at Barone. She liked to make you think that she could read your mind, that she could predict your every move. Maybe she could.

“It’s a compliment, mon cher,” she said. “Don’t look so grumpy.”

“Try a bite of this,” Carlos said.

“No.”

“C’mon. You don’t like German food? Let bygones be bygones.”

“I’m not hungry.” Barone didn’t have anything against the Germans. The war had happened a long time ago.

Seraphine wasn’t eating either. She lit a cigarette and then set the matchbook on the table in front of her. She positioned it this way and that, observing it from various angles.

“It’s time for you to proceed,” she told Barone. As if he were too dumb to figure it out by himself. “The matters we discussed.”

“Houston?” he said.

“Yes.”

“What about Mackey Pagano? I don’t have time for that, too.”

“Don’t worry,” Seraphine said. “That’s already been taken care of.”

“Did I say I was worried?” Barone said.

“Your appointment in Houston is tomorrow evening,” she said. “As we discussed. You’ll need to go see Armand first, though. Tonight.”

Carlos still eating, not saying a word, letting Seraphine handle everything. Most people thought that Carlos kept her around—the well-dressed, well-spoken colored girl—for blow jobs and dictation. Barone knew better. For every problem that Carlos could think up, Seraphine had a solution.

“All right,” Barone said.

His Impala was parked on Dumaine, a block off Bourbon. Friday night and hardly a handful of people around. Down on the corner, an old colored man was blowing “’Round Midnight” on the alto sax for a few tourists. Barone walked over to listen. He had a minute.

The old colored man knew how to play. He hit a D-sharp and held it, the note rising and spreading like water over a levee.

The guy next to Barone jostled him a little. Barone felt a hand brush against his pocket. He reached down and grabbed the hand. It belonged to a scrawny punk with pitted cheeks. Needle marks up and down the pale belly of his arm.

“What’s the big idea, pal?” the dope fiend said, playing innocent. “You wanna hold hands with somebody, go find a—”

Barone bent his hand backward. The human wrist was fragile, a bird’s nest of twigs and tendons. He watched the dope fiend’s face change.

“Oh,” the dope fiend said.

“Shhh,” Barone said. “Let the man finish his tune.”

Barone couldn’t remember the first time he’d heard “’Round Midnight.” On the piano, probably. Over the years he’d listened to fifty, maybe a hundred different versions. Piano, sax, guitar, even trombone a time or two. The old colored man tonight made the song feel brand-new.

The music ended. The dope fiend’s knees sagged, and Barone turned him loose. The dope fiend stumbled away, not looking back, hunched over his hand like it was a flame he worried might flicker out.

Barone dropped a dollar bill in the sax case. The old man might have been fifty years old or he might have been eighty. The whites of his eyes were as yellow as an old cue ball, and there were needle marks running the length of his arms, too. Maybe the old man and the dope fiend were partners, one drawing the crowd so the other could rob it. Probably.

The old man looked down at the dollar bill and then looked back up. He adjusted the mouthpiece of his alto. He didn’t have anything to say to Barone.

Barone didn’t have anything to say to him. He walked over to his Impala and slid behind the wheel.

THE WEST BANK OF THE MISSISSIPPI, JUST ACROSS THE RIVER from New Orleans, was a dirty strip of scrapyards, body shops, and lopsided tenement buildings, the wood rotting off them. The Wank, people called it. Barone understood why. The smell was something else. A couple of refineries fired night and day, a burning funk that stuck to your clothes and skin. Ships dumped their garbage on the New Orleans side, and it washed up here. Dead fish, too, the ones even the gulls wouldn’t touch.

He pulled off the main road and guided the Impala down a narrow track of oyster-shell gravel that ran parallel to the train tracks. Tires crunching, headlights bouncing over rows of busted windshields and caved-in grills. A stack of chrome bumpers ten feet high.

It was after midnight, but the lights in the office were still on. Barone knew they would be. A man gets in a certain habit, he stays there.

Armand’s office was just a shack, four walls and a corrugated tin roof. The front room had a desk, a sofa with one arm sawed off so it would fit, and a camp stove that Armand used to boil coffee. The back room was behind a door that looked like any other door. Solid steel. Try to kick that in and walk with a limp for the rest of your life.

Armand gave Barone a big smile. He was happy to see Barone. Why not? Barone shopped the top-shelf merchandise and never dickered too much.

“What’s doing, baby?” Armand said. “Where you been at? How long since the last time you come round to see me? Three months?”

“Two,” Barone said.

“You want something to drink? Look at you. Nice and trim. That ain’t me, baby. Man, I just peek round the corner at a plate of beans and rice, I get fatter.” He grabbed his belly with both hands and jiggled it for Barone. “See that? So where you staying at these days? Still over there by Burgundy Street?”

“No.”

“What you think ’bout all that business up there in Dallas? Awful shame, ain’t it? You ask me, it was the Russians behind it. One hundred percent. You just wait and see. The Russians.”

“I’ve got a new piece of work,” Barone said.

Armand laughed. “Down to business. Every time.”

“I need something tonight.”

“What you looking for?”

“Tell me what you have.”

Armand took out his ring of keys. “Well, snubbies, take your pick, two-inch or four-inch. Clean, guaranteed. Or you want something with a little more gris-gris, I got another .22 Magnum, cut down to the stock.”

“How much for the .22?” Barone said.

“Cost me a nickel more than the last one did.”

Barone doubted it. “Clean?”

“Guaranteed.”

“I’m not paying an extra nickel.”

“Oh, baby, you gonna put me outta business.”

“Let’s see it,” Barone said.

Armand unlocked the door to the back room. It was half the size of the front room, just enough space for a few boxes and a steamer trunk. He squatted down to unlock the steamer trunk. The effort made him groan.

“How’s LaBruzzo and them?” Armand said. “You know who I run across the other day? That big ugly rumpkin from Curley’s Gym. You remember him, muscles all over. I know you remember him. Guess who he works for now. I’ll tell you who. He …”

Armand glanced over and saw the gun in Barone’s hand. A .357 Blackhawk.

It took a beat for the gun to register. Then Armand’s face went flat, like a mask coming off. He stood back up.

“I sold you that,” Armand said. “Didn’t I? Threw in a box of .38 Short Colts.”

“A couple of years ago,” Barone said.

There were no cars on the road this time of night, and the shack was a long way from the next yard over. But Barone never took chances, not if he could help it. He decided to wait for a barge to pass and blow its horn.

“Just listen to me now, baby,” Armand said. “You barking up the wrong tree. Carlos is. I ain’t have no idea what this all about.”

He had one hand at his side and the other one on his belly, making slow circles. Barone wasn’t worried. Armand never carried a gun. The guns in the trunk were never loaded.

“Please,” Armand said. “I ain’t sold nothing to nobody. Whatever happened up there in Dallas, I ain’t got the first idea. Put me in front of Jesus Christ himself and I’ll swear it.”

So Armand did have an idea what this was about after all. Barone wasn’t surprised.

“Please, baby, you know I know how to keep my mouth shut,” Armand said. “Always have, always will. Let me talk to Carlos. Let me straighten him out.”

“You remember that big Christmas party at Mandina’s?” Barone said. “A couple of years after the war.”

“Yeah, sure,” Armand said. He couldn’t figure out why Barone was asking about a long-ago Christmas party. He couldn’t figure out why Barone hadn’t shot him yet. He was starting to think that he might have a chance. “Sure. Sure, I remember that party.”

Winter of ’46 or ’47. Barone had just gone to work for Carlos. He was living in a cold-water flat down the street from the Roosevelt Hotel.

“There was a piano player,” Barone said. He wondered if that Christmas party at Mandina’s was when he heard “’Round Midnight” the first time. “A piano player with a top hat.”

“And there was a Christmas tree,” Armand said. Nodding and grinning and finally giving in to hope, the sweet embrace of it. “That’s right. A big old Christmas tree with an angel on top.”

Barone thought about the old colored man playing “’Round Midnight” on his alto sax earlier, his fingers flying over the keys. Some people were born with a gift.

Finally a barge blew its horn, so loud and low that Barone felt the throb in his back teeth. He pulled the trigger.

A quarter of a mile east of Armand’s scrapyard, driving back to the bridge, Barone saw a car coming on, headed in the opposite direction. An old Hudson Commodore with a sunshade like the brim of a baseball cap.

Behind the wheel a woman. Barone’s headlights lit up her face as they passed. Her headlights lit up his.

He tapped the brakes and swung around. When he caught the Commodore, he flashed his headlights. The Commodore pulled onto the shoulder. Barone parked behind it. On his way to the driver’s window, he popped his switchblade and gave the back tire a quick jab.

“Damn it to hell, you scared me to death.” The woman had her hair up in curlers. Who was she? Why was she out here this time of night? Barone supposed it didn’t matter, the who or the why. “I thought you was the damn cops.”

“No,” he said.

She was missing a piece of a front tooth. Her smile was friendly. “The cops is the last thing in the damn world I need right now.”

“You’ve got a flat,” Barone said.

“Damn it. That’s the next-to-the-last thing in the world I need.”

“Come look.”

She climbed out of the car and came around to the back. She wore an old housecoat the color of dirty dishwater. When she heard the back tire hissing, she laughed.

“Well, if that ain’t the cherry on top of my sundae.” She laughed again. She had a nice laugh, like the cheerful jingle of coins in a pocket. “After the day I had, it’s the damn cat’s pajamas.”

“Open the trunk,” Barone said. “I’ll change it out for you.”

“My hero,” she said.

He checked to make sure the road was empty and then cut her throat, turning her a little so that she didn’t spill blood on his suit. After a minute she relaxed, like a silk dress slipping off a hanger. Barone just had to let her slide into the trunk of the car, no effort at all.

5

While everyone else gathered around the television in the living room, Charlotte inspected the dining table to see what she might have forgotten. She’d been awake since five-thirty that morning, baking and basting and grating and mincing. And last night she’d stayed up until almost midnight, polishing the silverware and ironing the Irish-lace tablecloth that Dooley’s parents had given them for their wedding.

Had she slept at all? She wasn’t entirely sure. At one point, lying on her back in the darkest hollow of the night, she’d felt the dog’s whiskery muzzle twitching close to her mouth, making sure she was still breathing.

Dooley’s mother, Martha, popped into the kitchen. “Need any help, Charlie?” she said.

“No thank you,” Charlotte said. “I’m just about ready.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

Both Martha and Dooley’s father, Arthur, were lovely people, gracious and unfailingly kind. If Charlotte had left the silver unpolished, the tablecloth unironed, if she’d forgotten the rolls or the cranberry sauce, they would have made a point not to notice.

Which made it worse somehow. Charlotte wished that her in-laws were less gracious, less lovely. Better a pair of cruel snippers, icy snubbers, implacable adversaries she could never hope to appease. The searchingly earnest way Dooley’s father studied Charlotte, the way his mother would reach out, unprompted, to pat Charlotte’s hand—their pity, at times, was agonizing.

In the living room, the mood was hushed and grim. The television report showed a horse-drawn caisson bearing the president’s casket from the White House to the Capitol. A reporter broke in to confirm that Lee Harvey Oswald, who had been shot earlier that morning, was dead.

Charlotte saw that Joan and Rosemary had snuck back inside to watch the TV.

“Rosemary,” she said. “Joan.”

Rosemary prepared to deliver arguments for the defense. “But, Mommy—”

“But nothing,” Charlotte said. “I told you to go play outside with your cousins.”

The girls had already been exposed to far too many hours of disturbing television news for which they were far too young. They understood that a bad man had killed the president of the United States. They didn’t need to know all the gruesome details.

“But they’re playing fort,” Rosemary said.

“So?” Charlotte said.

“They said we can’t play fort with them because we’re just girls.”

Before Charlotte could answer, Dooley’s brother, Bill, handed Charlotte his empty beer bottle. “I sure could use another one of these, Charlie,” he said.

During grace, her eyes closed and head bowed, Charlotte’s thoughts returned to that eleven-year-old girl knifing her way fearlessly across the river seventeen years ago. The following winter Charlotte’s father—just turned thirty-two, the very picture of ruddy health—had suffered a heart attack and died. His death devastated her. For the first time, Charlotte learned that life’s currents were more treacherous than she’d thought, that she was not as strong a swimmer.

After that … what happened? Charlotte’s mother, a distant and timid woman, grew even more so. She discouraged Charlotte from taking risks, from standing out, from expecting too much. Before too long Charlotte proved quite adept at discouraging herself. She’d enrolled at the University of Oklahoma instead of at one of the smaller colleges closer to home (though her mother discouraged it), but the moment Charlotte stepped foot on campus, she was overwhelmed. She’d just turned seventeen, she’d never been away from Woodrow before, she knew not a soul. In October, only six weeks into the semester, she packed her things and fled back home.

She found a job at the bakery, which is where one afternoon she struck up a conversation with a handsome customer. Dooley was three years older than Charlotte, so she hadn’t known him well in school. But he was friendly, fun, and he didn’t take himself as seriously as the other boys in town. He asked her out, and soon after that they started going together. Soon after that she married him and they moved into a house three blocks from the one she’d grown up in. Soon after that she was pregnant with Joan. Soon after that she was pregnant with Rosemary. Soon after that was right now.

“Mommy,” Rosemary whispered. “It’s your turn.”

“My turn?” Charlotte said.

Her turn. If only life were like that, Charlotte thought, a game where every round you were allowed to spin the wheel again, to pluck a fresh card from the pile. Though who was to say that a new spin or a fresh card would improve your position on the board?

There’s always a bumpier road than the one you’re driving on, Charlotte’s mother had always cautioned her. Be content with what you have, in other words, because the alternative is probably even worse. Her mother shared this philosophy when, for example, Charlotte complained that the math teacher in eighth grade refused to let any of the girls in class ask questions. When her boss at the bakery followed Charlotte into the back room and pressed her up against the wall. When Charlotte began to worry that Dooley, her fiancé at the time, was drinking too much.

“It’s your turn to say what you’re thankful for, Mommy,” Rosemary said.

“Well, let me see,” Charlotte said. “I’m thankful for my two beautiful daughters. I’m thankful for the family that could be with us today. I’m thankful for this wonderful Sunday dinner.”

Dooley carved the roast. The knife in his hand was steady. Each slice of the meat flopped onto the platter perfect and glistening. Whenever his parents came over for dinner, Dooley limited himself to a single beer or glass of wine. Even though his parents knew, everyone knew, that five minutes after the last guest was gone, Dooley would be out the door, too. Claiming that he had to pick up cigarettes or mail a letter or put gas in the car, back in a jiffy.

Early afternoon, the light from the dining-room window stern and wintry and uncompromising. Interesting light. Rosemary reached for the salt, and Dooley’s father reached for the rolls, and Dooley passed the gravy boat across to his mother. The arms overlapped and interlocked, creating frames within the frame, each a perfect miniature still life. An eye, a pearl in a necklace, the stripe of a tie. Charlotte wished that she had her camera handy. She’d get down low, shoot up from the surface of the table.

“The world is going to hell,” Dooley’s brother was saying. “Pardon my language, ladies, but it’s the truth. Kennedy, Oswald, Ruby, civil rights. Women thinking that they can do anything a man can do.”

“But shouldn’t they be allowed to try at least?” Charlotte said. “What’s the harm?”

Bill didn’t hear her and charged ahead, lifting his fork higher and higher with each point he made.

“It’s a battle for civilization, just like in the movies,” Bill said. “Fort Apache. That’s what a place like Woodrow is like. We’re the only ones left to fight off the Indians. We’ve got to circle the wagons, protect what this country stands for before it gets turned upside down by people who are all turned inside out. The Negro, for example. What most people don’t realize, the Negro prefers a separation of the races just as much as you or I do!”

Dooley and his father nodded along. Charlotte was curious to know when exactly the Negro had confided this preference to Bill, but she lacked the energy—or was it the courage?—to ask him. Bill was the second-most successful lawyer in Logan County and had never lost a case. Dooley’s father was the most successful lawyer in Logan County. If Charlotte dared dip a toe in a discussion about politics, the men would genially and implacably expose the various flaws in her logic, the way one might pick every last bone from a fish.

Charlotte’s sister-in-law touched her arm and gushed about a new pattern—a free-line overblouse on a pleated stem—that she’d discovered.

“It’s a terrible tragedy, what happened,” Dooley’s father said, “but the silver lining is that Johnson is an improvement on Kennedy. Johnson isn’t nearly so liberal. He’s from the South and understands the importance of moderation.”

“I can’t decide between a thin plaid wool or a whisper-check cotton,” Charlotte’s sister-in-law told her. “What’s your vote?”

Charlotte glanced over and noticed that Joan was watching her. Seeing what? Charlotte wondered. Learning what?

After dinner the men retired to the living room, the children went outside to play, and Charlotte started on the dishes. Dooley’s mother followed her into the kitchen. Charlotte tried to shoo her away from the dirty plates, but Martha ignored her and began to scrape.

“How have you been, dear?” Which meant, Charlotte knew, How has he been?

“Just fine,” Charlotte said.

“Those girls are little angels.”

“Well. Accounts vary.”

Martha placed a plate on top of the stack. “We spoiled him terribly,” she said after a moment. “The youngest, you know.”

Charlotte shook her head. “No, Martha,” she said. If anyone was to blame for the man Dooley had become, it was Charlotte. As his girlfriend she’d been stupidly blind to his flaws. As his wife she’d indulged him because the alternative was too difficult to contemplate.

“We’d like to pitch in, Arthur and I,” Martha said.

Charlotte shook her head again, the familiar ritual. “You’ve done too much already, Martha.”

“We know how hard it can be for a young couple.”

Charlotte’s eyes welled without warning, a hot, stinging shame. She turned to wipe down the stove so that Martha wouldn’t see. So that Martha could slip the folded bills into the pocket of her apron.

“Really,” Charlotte said. “It’s not necessary.”

“We insist,” Martha said. “We just wish it was more.”

Thirty minutes later they were gone, Dooley’s parents and his brother and sister-in-law, their three boys, all of them headed home. Five minutes after that, Charlotte was filling the roasting pan with hot water and dish soap when Dooley strolled into the kitchen, his coat and hat and gloves already on.

“We’ll need some milk for tomorrow morning, won’t we?” He gave her a kiss on the cheek. “I better run up there before the store closes.”

“Your mother gave us another three hundred dollars,” Charlotte said.

He rubbed the back of his neck. Dooley preferred to enjoy the fruits of charity without having to acknowledge the tree or the picking.

“Well, dang it, Charlie,” he said. “I don’t want their money. We don’t need it.”

She wanted to laugh. Instead she turned off the hot water and stepped away from the cloud of steam. “She insisted.”

“Well, next time you tell her no, Charlie. You understand?” He started edging toward the door. “Anyway, I better run up and get that milk.”

“And you’ll be back in a jiffy,” she said, “right after you have just one drink.”

That stopped him in his tracks. His expression reminded her of the picture that had been on TV all afternoon: Lee Harvey Oswald bent double, his mouth a startled O as Jack Ruby fired a bullet into his stomach.

Charlotte had surprised herself, too. But in for a penny, in for a pound. “We can’t keep on like this,” she said.

“Keep on like what?” he said.

“Let’s sit down and talk about it, honey. Really talk, for once.”

“Talk about what?”

“You know what.”

His face darkened, a gathering storm of righteous indignation. When he was drunk, he swore that he would never in his life touch another drop of liquor. When he was sober, he swore that he had never in his life touched a drop.

“What I know,” he said, “I know the girls are going to need some milk for their cereal in the morning.”

“Dooley …”

“What’s the matter with you, Charlie? Why do you want to ruin Sunday for everybody?”

She felt her energy drain away. He would keep at this, keep at her, for as long as it took. When you stood between Dooley and a bottle, he was the surf pounding the cliffs to sand. Surrender was the only sensible course of action.

“Go ahead,” she said.

“Don’t you want the girls to have milk for their cereal in the morning?”

“Go ahead. I’m sorry.”

He left, and she folded the tablecloth. She swept up the crumbs under the dining-room table and checked on the girls in their room. Rosemary had no fewer than three different Disney True-Life Adventures books open before her. Prowlers of the Everglades, The Vanishing Prairie, and Nature’s Half Acre. Joan was carefully clipping squares from sheets of colored construction paper. The dog lay curled between them on the bottom bunk, his usual spot.

“What are you doing, sweetie?” Charlotte asked Joan.

“She invented a game,” Rosemary said. “She’s going to teach me how to play when she’s finished inventing it. Where’s Daddy?”

“He ran up to the store,” Charlotte said.

Joan lifted her head. A look flashed between her and Rosemary. Or did Charlotte just imagine it? They were still too young, surely, to understand.

“What are the rules of the game, Joan?” Charlotte said.

“They’re very complicated,” Rosemary said. “Aren’t they, Joan?”

“Yes,” Joan said.

“Mommy?” Rosemary said. “Is Mrs. Kennedy very, very sad because the president died?”

“I would think so, yes,” Charlotte said.

“What will she do now?”

“What will she do? I’m not sure. Do you mean—”

“Who will she live with?” Rosemary said. “Who will take care of her?”

The question surprised Charlotte. “Why, I imagine that she’ll take care of herself.”

Rosemary looked doubtful. Another look flashed between her and Joan. “Mommy?” Rosemary said.

“One more question,” Charlotte said. “And then I have to get the clothes off the line before it’s dark.”

“You’d be very, very sad if Daddy died,” Rosemary said, “wouldn’t you?”

“Daddy’s not going to die. I promise.”

“But you’d be very, very sad.”

“Of course I would,” Charlotte said, and she meant it. Dooley wasn’t a bad person—far from it. He loved Charlotte and loved the girls, and he’d never once lifted a hand to any of them in anger. And the drinking … Deep down, she knew, he genuinely wanted to quit. One day, perhaps, he’d manage to do it.

But suppose he did quit drinking. What then? Charlotte’s life would be easier, certainly, but would it be happier? The seconds and minutes and hours would continue to tick past. The weeks, the months, the years. The futures she might have had, the women she might have become, those ghosts would grow fainter and fainter in the distance until they disappeared altogether. If Charlotte was lucky, she’d forget that they’d ever haunted her.

And the girls. It pained Charlotte that one day Rosemary and Joan might ask the same questions of themselves: What will we do? Who will take care of us?

Rosemary had turned back to her books, Joan to her squares of construction paper. Charlotte lingered in the doorway. She thought about her initial reaction to the assassination, how permanently fixed in her life the news had made her feel. But maybe that idea needed amendment. No, her world would never change—not unless she did something to change it.

The tornado might have blown Dorothy from Kansas to Oz, but Dorothy was the one who’d had to open the front door of the farmhouse and step outside.

Charlotte’s fingers touched the money in the pocket of her apron. Three hundred dollars. She had perhaps twice as much in the girls’ college savings account, money that Dooley didn’t know about and couldn’t squander.

Nine hundred dollars. It wasn’t nearly enough. But Charlotte didn’t let herself stop and think.

“Girls,” she said. “Go pack your suitcases.”

“Are we going somewhere?” Rosemary said, excited. “When are we leaving?”

Every now and then, Charlotte dreamed that she could fly. She’d be skipping to school, a child again, and then suddenly she’d find herself gliding weightlessly over cars, over trees, over entire houses. The secret was to not think about what was happening to you, what you were doing. Pretend it was just an ordinary day or the spell would be broken and down you’d come crashing.

“Mommy,” Rosemary said, “when are we leaving?”

“Now. In five minutes.”

“Is Daddy coming?” Joan said.

“No. It’s just us girls.”

“What about Lucky?” Rosemary said.

The dog. Oh, good Lord. But Charlotte couldn’t just leave the poor thing here. Dooley might forget to feed him or to give him his medicine. He might forget that the dog even existed.

“Lucky can come with us,” Charlotte said. “Now, hurry, go pack your suitcases.”

“Can I bring one doll or two dolls?” Rosemary said.

“One.”

“Are two small dolls the same as one big doll?”

“No.”

“But Joan can bring one doll, too. And we can each bring one book.”

“Yes. Now, go.”

Rosemary bounded away. Joan considered Charlotte solemnly.

“Where are we going, Mommy?” Joan said.

Charlotte reached out to smooth the golden hair that never needed it. “Let’s find out.”

6

Guidry’s Friday-night dinner with Al LaBruzzo dragged on. Guidry was his usual sparkling self, thank you very much, but it took some effort. He couldn’t chase the idea from his head that maybe, just maybe, Seraphine and Carlos planned to kill him.

No, don’t be ridiculous.

Yes, the math made sense. Guidry knew about the getaway Eldorado and its connection to the assassination. That made him a risk.

But he was one of Carlos’s most trusted associates, Seraphine’s friend and confidant. He’d proved his loyalty time and time again. Just count the times! Al LaBruzzo didn’t have enough fingers.

And look at it, too, from a more practical perspective. Guidry did important work for the organization. He opened doors through which flowed cash and influence. Carlos—a penny-pincher, so tight he squeaked when he walked—wouldn’t throw away as valuable an asset as Guidry. Waste not, want not, Carlos always said.

After dinner Guidry took a cab up Canal to the Orpheum and slipped into the middle of the picture, a comedy western with John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara horsing around on a ranch. The theater was almost empty.

Get rid of the Eldorado.

And then get rid of the man who got rid of the Eldorado. Get rid of the man who knows about Dallas.

The projector clattered. Cigarette smoke rose and bloomed in the beam of light from the booth. Three scattered couples in the theater, plus two other solo acts like Guidry. No one had come in since he’d plopped down. He was pretty sure no one had followed his cab up Canal.

Guidry was letting his imagination get the best of him. Could be. He’d seen it happen to guys who’d been around too long. The stress of the life worked away at them like salt spray on soft wood, and they started to fall apart.

Maybe I’m crazy. That was what Mackey Pagano had said to Guidry when he begged Guidry to find out if Carlos wanted him dead. Maybe I’m crazy.

But Mackey hadn’t been crazy, had he? Carlos had wanted Mackey dead, and now, almost certainly, dead Mackey was.

What else had Mackey said Wednesday night at the Monteleone? Guidry tried to remember. Something about a guy from San Francisco, the hit on the judge a year ago that Carlos had eventually decided against.

That was the kind of work Mackey had been doing the last few years, arranging for out-of-town specialists when Carlos didn’t have someone at hand, local, to do the work he needed.

Specialists, independent contractors. Such as, perhaps, a sniper who could pick off the president of the United States and then afterward drive away in a sky-blue Eldorado.

Guidry could no longer stomach the high jinks on the screen. He left the theater before the movie ended and walked back to his apartment building. Nobody following him, he was ninety-nine percent sure.

The canceled hit on the judge last year. Maybe it had been one of Seraphine’s elaborate smoke screens. Guidry knew how she operated. She’d used the cover of darkness to line up the sniper that Carlos had sent to Dealey Plaza today.

Mackey must have figured out some corner of the puzzle a few days ago. He must have recognized that he possessed dangerous information.

And now Guidry had figured out the same corner of the puzzle. Now he possessed that same dangerous information. Throw another log on the fire, shall we? Ye gods. Guidry’s day was just getting shittier and shittier.

But there was still hope. It was still possible that what had happened to Mackey was a coincidence, that Carlos had bumped him for reasons entirely unrelated to the assassination.

Guidry knew a source who might be able to shed light. When he reached his apartment building, he bypassed the lobby and went straight to the garage. Chick was sitting crumpled in the booth and staring at the radio like it was his own sweet mother who’d been shot in Dallas. The Negroes thought that Jack Kennedy loved them. Hate to break the news, Chick, but Jack Kennedy was like every smart cat: He loved himself and himself only.

“Bring my car around for me, Chick, will you?” Guidry said.

“Yes, sir, Mr. Guidry,” Chick said. “You been listening to the news? Good Lord, Good Lord.”

“You know what the Good Book says, Chick. ‘When thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned.’”

“Yeah you right.” Chick blew his nose into a handkerchief. “Yeah you right.”

Guidry drove over the bridge to the west bank. He tried the scrapyard first. Armand wasn’t in his little shack of an office, a surprise. Guidry knocked and knocked till his knuckles were numb. It was fine. He knew where Armand lived. Not too far up the road, a tidy little neighborhood of shotguns in Algiers Point.

Armand’s wife answered the door. Esmeralda, faded Cajun beauty, the crumbling ruins of a once-glorious civilization. Guidry wished he’d known her when. How a tubby motormouth gun peddler like Armand had landed such a prize, it was an enigma to unravel.

But another enigma had priority right now. Guidry crossed his fingers that Armand could help with the unraveling. Armand had known Mackey for almost half a century. The two of them had grown up together. Armand would know what Mackey had been up to.

“Sorry to trouble you, Esme, I know it’s late,” Guidry said. Late, but the lights in the house blazed and the smell of fresh-brewed coffee drifted out from the kitchen. Strange.

“Hello, Frank,” Esme said.

“I’m looking for Armand. He’s not at the office.”

“He’s not home.”

“I wish I could steal you away from him, Esme,” Guidry said. “I know you’ve been married a while, but give me the blueprints and I’ll do what it takes.”

“He’s not home,” she said again.

“No? Do you know where he is?”

Strange, too, that Esme hadn’t invited Guidry in yet, hadn’t offered him a cup of coffee. Every other time that Guidry had come round, now and then over the years, she’d dragged him through the door and pinned him to the sofa and flirted like she was seventeen years old. Usually Guidry had to make like Houdini just to wriggle free.

And why, if she was still up this late, wasn’t the television or the radio playing? Esme would throw herself in front of the St. Charles streetcar for Jackie Kennedy.

“He’s gone fishing,” Esme said. “Out to the Atchafalaya for a few days. You know how he loves it out there.”

In the spring, sure, when the bass were biting. But in November? “When’s he coming home?” Guidry said.

“I don’t know.”

She smiled, no strain showing. But Guidry could feel it. Something. Fear? He looked past her, into the house, and saw a suitcase by the kitchen door.

“My sister in Shreveport.” Esme answered the question before Guidry could ask it. “I’m taking the bus up to visit her this weekend.”

“How can I get hold of Armand?” Guidry said.

“I don’t know. Good-bye, Frank.”

She shut the front door. Guidry walked slowly back to his car. Armand was dead. Guidry resisted the conclusion, but it was the only one he could draw. Armand had been bumped, like Mackey, and Esme knew it. She was scared out of her wits that Carlos would come after her if she breathed a word. Smart lady.

Mackey had been bumped because he’d arranged for the sniper.

Armand had been bumped because … That was easy. Because he was Carlos’s most discreet and reliable source of weapons. You wouldn’t know to look at Armand, at the scrapyard shack, but he could get any kind of gun and move it anywhere.

The evidence mounted. Carlos was clipping the threads that connected him to the assassination. Who next but Guidry?

No, don’t be ridiculous. Guidry was a valuable asset, et cetera, his perch in the organization only a branch or two beneath Seraphine’s, et cetera. Though that wasn’t as encouraging a notion, Guidry realized, as he’d first assumed. From up here he could see it all, he could see too much, he could put all the pieces together.

And what about that jittery deputy chief in Dallas, the reason Seraphine had sent Guidry to Dallas in the first place? Did that count as another strike against Guidry?

As he crossed the bridge back over the Mississippi, the black water below reminded him of the dream he’d had last night. Omens and portents.

Carlos and Seraphine could have used anyone in the organization to stash the getaway Eldorado in Dallas, someone disposable. Why did they use Guidry? Because, maybe, they’d already decided that his time was up.

He rented a room at a cheap motel out in Kenner. He didn’t think that Seraphine would make a move before he dumped the Eldorado in Houston, but just to be safe. Guidry always kept a suitcase in the car. A toothbrush, a change of clothes, a couple grand in cash. Saturday morning he stood in the terminal at Moisant and studied the departure board. The flight to Houston that Seraphine had booked for him left at ten. A flight to Miami left at half past.

Guidry could take the flight to Miami and try to disappear. Suppose, though, he wasn’t on Carlos’s list after all. If Guidry ran now, he’d shoot straight to the top of the charts, congratulations.

If he ran, he would have to leave behind everything. His life. The smiles and the nods and the bellboys at the Monteleone scrambling to open the door for him, the beautiful redheads and brunettes eyeing him from across the room.

His nest egg was back in the nest. How the fuck was he supposed to disappear forever with only a couple thousand bucks in his wallet?

Seraphine might have someone at the airport watching him. Guidry didn’t overlook the possibility. So he moseyed over to the bar and ordered a Bloody Mary and chatted up the cocktail waitress. Not a care in the world, had Frank Guidry.

After the last call from the gate, he boarded the plane to Houston. Carlos wouldn’t bump him. Seraphine wouldn’t let him. Armand and Mackey—they were beasts of burden, spare parts. Guidry was the right hand of the right hand of the king himself, untouchable. Or so he hoped.

THE RICE, AT THE CORNER OF MAIN AND TEXAS, WAS THE swankiest hotel in Houston, with a pool in the basement and a dance pavilion on the roof. The Thanksgiving decorations were out—a papier-mâché turkey in a Pilgrim hat, a horn of plenty overflowing with wax apples and squash. But the lobby felt like a funeral, every step soft, every voice hushed. Kennedy had spent the night before his assassination in a suite here. Probably an enjoyable night, given the stories Guidry had heard about him.

Guidry’s room on the ninth floor of the Rice looked down on the pay lot across the street. The sky-blue Cadillac Eldorado sat in the back corner, the sun winking off the chrome. Guidry watched the Eldorado for a while. Watched the lot. He counted his money again. Two thousand one hundred and seventy-four bucks. He called down and had room service bring up a club sandwich, a bottle of Macallan, a bucket of ice. Don’t think of it as a last supper. Don’t. He hung his suit coat on the back of the bathroom door and ran the shower, hot, to steam the creases from the wool.

At four-thirty he walked across the street and tugged on his Italian calfskin driving gloves and slid behind the wheel of the Eldorado. South toward La Porte, window rolled down to flush out the lingering ghost of sweat and Camels and hair oil. Where was he now? The specialist from San Francisco who took the shot and then drove the Eldorado down from Dallas? Long gone, Guidry supposed, one way or another.

He stuck to the speed limit, watched for a tail. A few blocks before he reached La Porte, he pulled in to the crowded parking lot of a Mexican restaurant.

The backseat was clean. He popped the lid of the trunk. Why? Guidry couldn’t say for sure. He just wanted to know everything he could know. He’d been that way since he was running around in diapers.

An old army barracks bag, olive-drab canvas with a drawstring neck. Guidry opened it. Inside, wrapped in a denim work shirt, was a bolt-action rifle with a four-power scope. A box of 6.5 millimeter shells, a couple of brass casings. Binoculars. The embroidered patch on the work shirt said DALLAS MUNICIPAL TRANSIT AUTHORITY.

Guidry cinched the duffel back up and shut the trunk. East on La Porte, past a few miles of new prefab tract houses that would collapse if you sneezed on them. The houses gave way to the refineries and chemical plants and shipyards. After the Humble Oil refinery, last on the row, a long stretch of virgin swamp and pine. There is a pleasure in the pathless woods. Which doped-up English dandy had written that? Guidry couldn’t remember. Coleridge or Keats, Byron or Shelley. One of them. I love not Man the less, but Nature more.

The sun sank behind him. It wasn’t much of a sun to start with, just a patch of shiny gray in the darker gray of the sky, like the worn elbow of a cheap blazer.

No other cars, coming or going, not since he’d passed the Humble refinery. The unmarked road was a single narrow lane of broken asphalt and black mud gouged through the trees.

Guidry turned onto it and then stopped. Go on? Or back up? He idled, thinking. His father used to play a game when he was a little drunk or a lot drunk or not drunk and just bored. He’d hold his hands in front of him and order Guidry or his little sister to pick a hand, right or left. You didn’t win the game. One hand was a punch, the other hand was a slap. Lose your nerve and fail to pick in time, you’d get one of each, good old Pop busting a gut he laughed so hard.

The road led to a sagging chain-link fence. Gate open. The bottom half of the wooden sign clipped to the gate had splintered off. All that remained was a big red NO.

Omens and portents. Guidry drove on, between the two rows of corroded metal drums, each one as big as a house. When he reached the dock, he put the Eldorado in park and climbed out. Something, the weedy muck at the base of the tanks, made his eyes burn—a rich, earthy shit-rot, a poisonous chemical tang.

Guidry, once he turned seven or eight years, had refused to play his father’s game—he’d refused to pick left hand or right. A small act of rebellion that he paid dearly for, but Guidry didn’t like surprises. He’d rather take the punch and the slap than not know which one was coming.

He looked around. He didn’t see a glint of metal, didn’t hear a rustle of movement. But he wouldn’t, would he?

A heavy chain was looped between a pair of iron cleats, but the key was in the padlock. Seraphine had made this simple for Guidry. Or she’d made it simple for the man sent to kill him. Put Guidry in the trunk when you’re done. Put the car in the channel.

He dragged the chain to the side and rolled the Eldorado to the end of the dock. The big car hung on the edge for a second—nose down, like it was sniffing the water—and then slid in and under, barely a ripple.

Walking through the trees back to La Porte. Breathing deeply, in and out. With each step he took, Guidry’s heart thudded a little slower, a little slower, a little slower. He needed a drink and a steak and a girl. And he needed to move his bowels all of a sudden, to beat the goddamn band.

He was alive. He was all right.

At the filling station on La Porte, the pump jockey squinted at Guidry. “Where’s your car at, mister?”

“About a mile up the road, headed due west at forty miles an hour, my wife behind the wheel,” Guidry said. “I hope you’re not married, friend. It’s a carnival ride.”

“I ain’t married,” the pump jockey said. “Wouldn’t mind to be, though.”

“Stand up straight.”

“What?”

“If you want to have luck with the ladies,” Guidry said. He was in a generous mood. “Head up, shoulders back. Carry yourself with confidence. Give the lady your full attention. You have a phone I can use?”

A pay phone on the side of the building. Guidry used his first dime to call a cab. He used his second dime to call Seraphine.

“No problems,” he said.

“But of course not, mon cher.”

“All right, then.”

“You’ll spend the night at the Rice?” she said.

“Uncle Carlos better cover my tab.”

“He will. Enjoy.”

Back inside, Guidry caught the pump jockey practicing his posture in the reflection off the front glass. Head up, shoulders back. Maybe he’d get the hang of it. Guidry asked about the men’s room, and the pump jockey sent him outside again, to the back of the building this time.

WHITES ONLY. Guidry entered the single stall and sat down and with great relief released the acid churn he’d been carrying around in his belly for the past twenty-four hours. On the cinder-block wall next to the toilet, someone had used the tip of a knife to scratch a few words.

HERE I SIT ALL BROKEN HEARTED

TRIED TO

That was it. Inspiration had flagged or the poet had finished his business.

When Guidry came out of the men’s room, his cab had arrived. It dropped him at the Rice, and he headed straight to the Capital Club. A few promising Texas bluebonnets were scattered about, but first things first. Guidry sat at the bar and ordered a double Macallan neat, another double Macallan neat, a rib eye with creamed spinach.

One of the bartenders, blond hair so pale it was almost white, sidled over and asked out of the corner of his mouth if Guidry wanted to buy some grass. Don’t mind if I do. Seraphine had instructed him to enjoy his evening, had she not? The bartender told Guidry to meet him in ten minutes, the alley behind the hotel.

Guidry had lifted the last sip of Macallan to his lips. You’ll spend the night at the Rice? That’s what Seraphine had asked him on the phone. Why would she need to ask that? She’d booked his hotel room and knew that his return flight departed tomorrow morning. Why would she need to ask that, and why had Guidry not wondered about it until now?

“I’m a dumb-ass,” he said.

The bartender watched him. “What?”

“I left my wallet upstairs.” Guidry gave him a wink. “See you in five minutes.”

He left the bar and crossed the hotel lobby, past the elevators and out through the revolving door. The bellhop in the porte cochere said he’d whistle up a cab for Guidry, it’d only take a minute. Guidry didn’t have a minute. He walked to the end of the block, turned the corner, and started running.

7

Saturday afternoon Barone caught his flight to Houston. On the plane he flipped through last month’s Life. NASA had picked fourteen new astronauts. Buzz cuts, bright eyes, square jaws. Barone couldn’t tell them apart. God and Mom and country. If they wanted to strap themselves to a bomb and go flying through space, Barone wasn’t going to stop them.

The guy sitting next to him was from Dallas. He told Barone that everyone in his office cheered when they heard the news about Kennedy. Good riddance. The guy said he didn’t know what was worse about Kennedy, that he was a Catholic or a liberal or loved the Negroes so much. Dollars to doughnuts, Kennedy probably had some Jew blood, too. The guy had it on good authority that the Oval Office had a special phone line direct to the Vatican. Jack and Bobby took their orders straight from the pope. The newspapers covered it up because they were owned by Jews. How did Barone like that?

“I’m Catholic,” Barone said. It wasn’t true, or not any longer, but he wanted to see the guy’s face.

“Well …” the guy said. “Well …”

“And I’m married to a colored girl. She’s meeting me at the airport if you want to say hello.”

The guy stiffened. His lips disappeared. “There’s no need to get smart with me, friend,” he said. “I’m not trying to start any trouble.”

“It’s all right with me,” Barone said. “I don’t mind trouble.”

The guy looked around for a stewardess to witness Barone’s poor manners. When one didn’t appear, he harrumphed and flapped open his newspaper. He ignored Barone the rest of the way to Houston.

A quarter to six, the plane landed at Municipal. Barone stepped out of the terminal in time to catch the last light of day burning on the horizon. Or maybe just a refinery flaring off gas. The air in Houston was even wetter and heavier than it was in New Orleans.

One of Carlos’s elves had left a car for him in the airport parking lot. Barone tossed the briefcase in back. Under the seat was a .22 Browning Challenger. Barone didn’t think he’d need a piece, but no one ever ended up in a morgue drawer by being too careful. He removed the screw-on can and checked the barrel for crud. He checked the magazine, the slide. The Browning was accurate up close and fairly quiet.

The guy from the plane walked across the lot. Barone put the front sight on him and followed along until the guy found his car, got in, drove off. Maybe some other time, friend.

Traffic. Barone inched along. It took him twenty minutes to get to Old Spanish Trail. The Bali Hai Motor Court was an L-shaped cinder-block building, two stories high, canted around a pool. Every few seconds the glow in the pool shifted from green to purple, from purple to yellow, from yellow to green again.

Barone parked across the street, in front of a bulldozed barbecue joint. Most of this side of Highway 90 was already a construction site, the roadhouses and filling stations and motor courts torn down to make room for a new stadium and parking lot. When it was finished, the stadium would have a roof, a giant dome you’d be able to see from miles away. Astronauts and an Astrodome, the future. So far only a few curved steel girders had been raised. They looked like the fingers of a hand trying to claw up through the crust of the earth.

The Bali Hai had two separate sets of stairs that led up to the breezeway on the second floor. Barone had been out last week to look the place over. One set of stairs at the far north end of the building. One set in the middle, crook of the L, in back. Only the maid used those stairs. You couldn’t see them from the pool or the highway or the office.

The mark had the room on the second floor that was closest to the middle stairs. Number 207. Seraphine said that the mark would check in around five. Barone couldn’t tell for sure if he was in the room yet or not. A light in the room was on, but the curtains were drawn.

Barone settled in. If he was lucky, the mark would step outside for a breath of fresh air. Some guys didn’t mind doing a hit on the cuff. Barone, no. He liked to be as prepared as possible. Seraphine said the mark was a big boy. Barone wanted to see how big, with his own two eyes.

The mark was an independent contractor from San Francisco, going by the name of Fisk. That was all Barone knew about him. That, and he was good with a scope. Long-range shooters tended to be oddballs. Barone had known one guy, years ago, who could barely tie his shoelaces by himself. But point out a German in the bushes three hundred yards away and pow.

Thirty minutes passed. An hour. Barone yawned, still thinking about the war. In Belgium once he fell asleep in his foxhole while his company waited for the Germans to come out of the woods at them. The sergeant shook Barone awake and asked if he had a screw loose, how calm he was all the time.

Maybe Barone did have a screw loose. He’d considered the possibility. But what if he did? There was nothing he could do about it. You’re born a certain way. You stay that way. Everyone got what they deserved.

It started to rain. The sign for the Bali Hai featured a hula girl with a neon grass skirt that shimmied back and forth. The rain and the light from the sign and the headlights from the cars driving past formed strange shapes on Barone’s windshield, slow, sinuous dancers. He hummed along, Coltrane’s solo from “Cherokee.”

At a quarter till nine, the rain stopped. A minute later the door to 207 opened and the mark, Fisk, stepped out onto the breezeway. A big boy, all right. Seraphine hadn’t exaggerated. Six foot two or three, with a barrel chest and a thick slab of gut that made his arms and legs look spindly. Around fifty years old. He was playing tourist, dressed in a short-sleeved Ban-Lon shirt the color of brown mustard, a pair of checkered slacks.

He lit a cigarette and leaned against the wooden balcony rail. The deep end of the pool was right beneath his room. The reflection rippled over him, the glow shifting. Purple, yellow, green. When he finished the cigarette, he flicked it away and took out a comb. He ran the comb through his thinning hair. A lefty. See? Seraphine hadn’t mentioned that. That was why Barone liked to take his time, gather his own information.

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