Free A Stained White Radiance by James Lee Burke Page A

jays playing in the birdbath on the lawn.
    â€œI’m going to ask you to accept something,” she said. “I can’t help you out about Weldon. If I try to, I may hurt him. That’s something I’m not going to do.”
    â€œMaybe it’s not yours to decide what degree of involvement you’ll have with the law, Drew.”
    â€œYou want to put that a little more clearly?”
    I raised my eyes to hers.
    â€œEarlier today I cuffed your brother to a D-ring in my office. It was for only a few minutes, but I hope the lesson wasn’t lost on him.”
    â€œA what?”
    â€œIt’s an iron ring, like a tethering ring, inset in the floor. Sometimes we handcuff people in custody to it until we can move them into a holding area.”
    â€œThat was supposed to impress Weldon? Are you serious?”
    I felt the skin of my face tighten.
    â€œDo you know the kind of life he had growing up?” she said. “I won’t even try to describe it to you. But no matter how bad it was, he’d give whatever he had to me and Lyle. And I mean he’d take the food out of his mouth for us.”
    I looked out at the lawn again.
    â€œYou’ve got something to say?” she said.
    â€œI’m at a loss.”
    â€œWe perplex you?”
    â€œYour family didn’t have the patent on hard times.”
    She rubbed the heels of her hands idly on her thighs.
    â€œYou’ll never get my brother to cooperate with you by pushing him,” she said.
    â€œWhat’s he into, Drew?”
    â€œForget the D-ring clown act and maybe one day he’ll tell you about it.”
    â€œI should revise my methods? That’s the problem?”
    â€œStop acting like a simpleton.”
    â€œYou always knew how to say it.”
    I could have pressed on with my questions, but Drew was not one to be taken prisoner. Or at least that’s what I told myself. I put my iced tea back on the table and stood up.
    â€œSee you around,” I said.
    â€œThat’s it?”
    â€œWhy not? You’ve been straight with me, haven’t you?”
    I walked across the blue-green lawn through the shade trees and could almost feel her troubled, hot eyes on my neck.
    I WENT BACK to the office and talked with our fingerprint man, who told me that trying to sort out the prints in Weldon’s home was a nightmare. There was no single, significant object, such as a murder weapon, for him to work with, and virtually every inch of space inside the house had been touched, handled, or smeared by family members, house guests, servants, meter readers, and a crew of carpenters that Weldon had evidently hired torefurbish several rooms. The fingerprint man asked me if I would present him with an easier job next time, like recovering prints from the Greyhound bus depot.
    When I got home I found a note from Bootsie on the kitchen table, saying that she had taken Alafair with her to the grocery store in town. The evening was warm, the western sky maroon with low-hanging strips of cloud, and I put on my gym shorts and running shoes and did three miles along the dirt road by the bayou’s edge. Gradually I could feel the fatigue and concerns of the day leave me, and at the drawbridge I turned around and hit it hard all the way home, the blood pounding in my neck, the sweat glazing on my chest. The house was in shadow now, the notched and pegged cypress planks as dark and hard-looking as iron, and I went into the backyard, where I could still see the late sun above the duck pond and the roofless barn at the foot of my property, and began alternating six sets of push-ups, leg lifts, and stomach crunches.
    I propped my feet on the bench of the redwood picnic table that we kept under the mimosa tree and did each push-up as slowly as I could, my back straight, touching my forehead lightly against the clipped grass, my muscles tightening across my ribs and through my shoulders and biceps. I was old enough to