Her body was found just before dawn the next morning by a black man who was running his trotlines in the swamp. The sun was still low on the horizon, veiled in mist, when Helen Soileau and I boarded a St. Martin Parish Sheriff's Department boat with two detectives and the coroner and a uniformed deputy from St. Martinville. We headed up Bayou Benoit in the coolness of the early morning, between flooded woods and through bays that were absolutely silent, undimpled by rain or ruffled by wind, the willows and gum trees and moss-hung cypress as still in the green light as if they had been painted against the sky. The uniformed deputy turned the boat out of the main channel and cut back the throttle and took us through a stand of tupelo gums that were hollowed out by dry rot and whose trunks resonated like drums when the boat's hull scraped against them. Then we saw the desiccated remains of a houseboat that had lain twistedinside the trees since Hurricane Audrey had struck south Louisiana in 1957, its gray sides strung with blooming morning glories. Up on a sand spit that looked like the humped back of a whale, Linda Zeroski sat in the wood chair, her head slumped forward, as though she had nodded off to sleep. At her feet were the bloodied pieces of brown paper that had been the bag covering her head. The coroner, who was a decent elderly man known for his planter's hats and firehouse suspenders and bow ties, pulled polyethylene* gloves on his hands and lifted Linda's chin, then gingerly rotated her head from side to side. A breeze suddenly came up and the leaves in the canopy fluttered with sunlight, and I looked into Linda's destroyed face and felt myself swallow. The coroner stepped back and pulled off his gloves with popping sounds and dropped them in a garbage bag. "How do you read it, Doc?" Helen asked. "I'd say she was beaten with fists, probably by somebody who's as powerful with one hand as with the other," he said. "There are fragments of what looks like leather in a couple of the wounds. My guess is he was wearing gloves. Of course, he could have been using a leather-covered instrument, but in that case there would probably be lesions on the top of the skull, where the skin would split more easily." A St. Martin Parish detective named Lemoyne was writing in a notepad. He was an overweight man and wore a rain hat and tie and long-sleeved white shirt and galoshes over his street shoes. He kept swiping mosquitoes out of his face. "What kind of guy are we looking for, Doc?" he asked. "You ever get drunk and do something you wished you hadn't?" the coroner asked. The detective seemed to study his notepad. "Yeah, once or twice," he replied. "The man who did this wasn't drunk. He beat her for a very long time. He enjoyed it immensely. He crushed every bone in her face. One eye is knocked all the way back into the skull. She may have strangled to death on her own blood. The beating may have gone on after she was dead. What kind of man is he? The kind who looks just like your next-door neighbor," the coroner said.
The next afternoon Clete Purcel dropped by my office. He was living in a lovely old stucco motor court, shaded by live oaks, on Bayou Teche, and he was trying to convince me to go fishing with him that evening. Then something out the window caught his attention. "Is that Joe Zeroski coming up the walk?" he asked. "Probably." "What's he doing around here?" "The prostitute who was killed on Bayou Benoit yesterday? That was his daughter," I said. "I didn't make the connection. I'll wait for you outside." "What's wrong?" "He and I have a history." "Over what?" "When I was at the First District, I had to clock him once with a flashlight. Actually, I had to clock him five orsix times. He wouldn't stay down. The guy's nuts, Streak. I'd lose him." Then Clete grinned with self-irony, as he always did when he knew his advice was of no use, and left my office and went into the men's room across the corridor. Joe Zeroski grew up in the Irish Channel of New Orleans and quit high school when he was sixteen in order to become a high-rise steelworker. Even as a kid Joe was wrapped so tight his fellow workers treated him as they would gasoline fumes around an open flame. When he was twenty, a notoriously violent and cruel Texas oilman and his bodyguard came into Tony Bacino's club in the French Quarter and arbitrarily decided to pulverize someone at the bar. The oilman chose a laconic, seemingly innocuous working-class kid who was hunched over a draft beer. The kid was Joe Zeroski. Fifteen minutes later the oilman and his bodyguard were in an ambulance on their way to Charity Hospital. Two Detroit wrestlers were hired by a construction company to escort scabs through a union picket line. One of them stiff-armed Joe aside. Before the wrestler ever knew what hit him, he was on the ground and Joe was astraddle his chest, packing handfuls of gravel into his mouth while the strikers cheered. But Joe's first big score was one he could never claim official recognition for. At twenty-two he made his bones with the Giacano family by taking out a cop killer who had tried to clip Didoni Giacano's son. Wiseguys and off-duty cops all across New Orleans bought Joe a beer and a shot whenever they saw him. Joe came into my office like a man who had justclawed his way out of a tomb. He stood flat-footed in the center of the room, slightly hunched, his nostrils white-edged, his hands balling and unballing by his sides. "Sorry about your daughter, Joe. I hope to be of some help in finding the guy who did this," I said. His hair was steel-gray, parted in the middle, sheep-sheared on the sides, and his gray eyes were filled with an analytical glare that seemed to dissect both people and objects with the same level of suspicion. He wore a tweed sports coat, gray slacks, loafers with white socks, and a pink shirt with a charcoal-colored tennis racquet above the pocket. When he stepped closer to my desk, I smelled an odor like heat and stale antiperspirant trapped in his clothes. "There's a black kid just made bond. He raped and snuffed a white girl with a shotgun. Why ain't he in here?" His speech was like most New Orleans working-class people of his generation, an accent and dialect that sounded much more like Brooklyn than the Deep South. "Because he's not connected with your daughter's death," I replied. "Yeah? How many people you got around here could do these kinds of things?" he said. When he spoke, he tilted his face upward so that his bottom teeth were exposed in the way a fish's might. "We're working on it, partner," I said. "The black kid's name is Hulin. Bobby Hulin. He lives on an island somewhere." "Right. You stay away from him, too." He leaned down on my desk, his fists denting my inkblotter. His breath was moist, sour, rife with funk, like the smell a freshly opened grease trap might give off. "My wife died of leukemia last year. Linda was my only child. I ain't got a lot to lose. You reading me on this?" he said. "Wrong way to talk to people who are on your side, Joe," I said. "Y'all are lucky I ain't who I used to be." "I'll walk you to the front door," I said. "Flog your joint," he replied. So instead I got a drink from the watercooler in the corridor and watched Joe walk toward the front of the courthouse, then I went to check my mail. But it was not over. Perry LaSalle had just walked into the department. Joe Zeroski's head jerked around when he heard Perry give his name to the dispatcher. "You're the lawyer for that Hulin kid?" he asked. "That's right," Perry replied. "It makes you feel good putting a degenerate kills young girls back on the street?" Joe asked. "Looks like I wandered in at the wrong time," Perry said. "My daughter was Linda Zeroski. I find out some shitbag you sprung beat her to death . . ." He couldn't finish his sentence. His eyes watered briefly, then he brushed his wrist across his mouth, staring disjointedly into space. Outside, the bells on the railway crossing clanged senselessly in an empty street. Wally, our three-hundred-pound, hypertensive dispatcher, stopped his work and slipped his horn-rimmed glasses into their leather case and placed the case on hisdesk and stepped out into the foyer. Clete Purcel stood at the reception counter, motionless, his damp comb clipped inside the pocket of his Hawaiian shirt, his pale blue porkpie hat slanted on his head. He inserted a Lucky Strike in the corner of his mouth and opened the cap on his Zippo but never struck the flint. "You all right, Joe?" Clete asked. Joe stared at Clete, his temples pulsing with tiny veins. "What the fuck you doing here?" he asked. Then Perry LaSalle decided to continue on his way to the sheriffs office. "I'm sorry for your loss, sir," he said. He accidentally brushed against Joe's arm. Joe blindsided him and hooked him murderously in the jaw, the blow whipping Perry's face sideways, flinging spittle agains
t the wall. Then Joe hit him below the eye and a third time in the mouth before Clete caught him from behind and wrapped his huge arms around Joe's chest and lifted him off the ground and slammed his face down on a desk. But Joe freed one arm and ripped an elbow into Clete's nose, splattering blood across Clete's cheek. The dispatcher and I both grabbed Joe and threw him against the desk again and kicked his legs apart and pushed the side of his face down on a dirty ashtray. "Put your wrists behind you! Do it now, Joe!" I said. Then Joe Zeroski, who had killed perhaps nine men, sank to one knee, the backs of his thighs trembling, his arms forming a tent over his head as he tried to hide the shame and grief in his face.
CHAPTER 5
Iwalked with Perry LaSalle into the men's room and held his coat for him while he washed his face with cold water. There was a cluster of red bumps under his right eye and blood in his saliva when he spit. "You cutting that guy loose?" he asked. "Unless you want to press charges," I replied. He felt his mouth and looked in the mirror. His eyes were still angry. Then, as though realizing his expression was uncharacteristic of the Perry LaSalle we all knew, he blew out his breath and grinned. "Maybe I'll catch him down the road," he said. "I wouldn't. Joe Zeroski was a hit man for the Giacano family," I said. His eyes became neutral, as though he did not want me to read them. He took his coat from my hand and put it on and combed his hair in the mirror. Then he stopped. "Are you staring at me for some reason, Dave?" he asked. "No." "You think I'm bothered because this guy was a meatball for the Giacanos?" he said. "On my best day I can't even take my own inventory, Perry," I said. "Save the Twelve Step stuff for a meeting, old pard," he replied. A few minutes later I walked with Clete Purcel to his car. The top was down and a half-dozen fishing rods were propped against the backseat. We watched Perry LaSalle's Gazelle pull out of the parking lot and cross the train tracks and turn onto St. Peter Street. "He's not going to file on Zeroski?" Clete asked. "Perry's grandfather ran rum with the Giacanos during Prohibition. I don't think Perry wants to be reminded of the association," I said. "Everybody ran rum back then," Clete said. "Somebody else did his grandfather's time. You're not going to try to square that elbow in the nose, are you?" Clete thought about it. "It wasn't personal. For a button man Joe's not a bad guy." "Great standards." "This is Louisiana, Dave. Guatemala North. Quit pretending it's the United States. Life will make a lot more sense," he said.
Iworked late at the office that evening. The eight-by-ten death photos of Linda Zeroski and Amanda Boudreau were spread on my desk. The body postures and faces of the dead always tell a story. Sometimes thejaw is slack, the mouthrobbed of words, as though thedying person hassuddenly discovered the fraudulent nature of the world. Perhapsthe gaze is focused on a shaft of sunlight through a tree, or a tear is sealed in the corner of the eye, or the palms lie open as though surrendering the spirit. I would like to believe that those who die violently are consoled by presences that care for and protect them in a special way. But the eyes of Linda Zeroski and Amanda Boudreau haunted me, and I wanted to find their killers and do something horrible to them. On the way home I drove to the pickup corner where Linda Zeroski had gotten into an automobile under a spreading oak and driven off, without concern, into a sunset that looked like purple and red smoke against the western sky. The teenage crack dealers who had supposedly been her friends were bored with my questions, then irritated that I was interrupting the flow of business on the corner. When I did not leave, they glanced at one another, formulating a different response, as though I were not there. Their voices became unctuous, their faces sincere, and they indicated to a man they would certainly call my office if they heard any information that might be helpful. I started to get back into my truck. Then I stopped and walked back under the oak tree. "Does Tee Bobby Hulin ever swing by the corner?" I asked. "Tee Bobby likes them when they sweet, white, and sixteen. I don't see nothing like that 'round here, suh," one kid said. The others snickered. "What are you telling me?" I asked. "Tee Bobby got his own thing. It just ain't got nothing to do wit' us," the same kid said. They lowered their heads in the shadows, suppressing their grins, kicking at the dust, their eyes flicking with amusement at one another. I walked back to my truck and got in. The heat lightning in the south pulsed like quicksilver in the clouds.
JoeZeroski had asked how many individuals in our area were capable of the crimes committed against the persons of his daughter and Amanda Boudreau. Could Tee Bobby have been involved in the abduction of Linda Zeroski? Tee Bobby's grandmother had said that Tee Bobby's present trouble had started before he was born. Maybe it was time to find out what she had meant. I drove home and parked in the drive and went into the bait shop. Batist was by himself, eating a sandwich at the counter. "How well do you know Tee Bobby?" I asked. "Good enough so's I don't want to know him," he answered. "You think he could rape and murder a young girl?" "What I t'ink don't count." "What do you know about Ladice Hulin's relationship to the LaSalle family?" He finished his coffee and stared out the screen at the bream night-feeding on the moths that fried themselves on the floodlamps and fell into the water. "Stories about white men and black field women ain't never good, Dave. You want to hear it, my sister growed up with Ladice," he said. I told my wife, Bootsie, I'd eat supper late, and Batistand I drove to his sister's small house outside Loreauville, where I listened to a tale that took me back into the Louisiana of my boyhood.
But actually, even before Batist's sister began her account, I already knew much of the LaSalle family's history, not because I necessarily admired them or even found them interesting, but because their lives had become the mirror and measure of our own. In one fashion or another the town had been a participant in all their deeds, all their reversals of fortune, for good or bad, from the time the first cabins were hewn and notched out of cypress on the banks of Bayou Teche, to the federal occupation in 1863 and later the restoration of the old oligarchy by the White League and the Knights of the White Camellia during Reconstruction, into modern times when Cajuns and people of color were deliberately kept uneducated and poor in order to ensure the availability of a huge and easily manipulated labor pool. The LaSalles had believed colonial Louisiana would allow them to realize all the grandiose dreams that Robespierre's guillotine had denied some of their family members. But they soon learned that revolutionary France had not quite finished paying back their kind for centuries of royal arrogance. In fact, they were the bunch Napoleon Bonaparte selected as the target for his most successful large-scale swindle. They paid large sums to obtain land grants in Louisiana from his government, only to discover in 1803 that Napoleon had sold the land from under their feet to the Americans in order to finance his wars. But the LaSalles were a resilient group, not to be undone by a Corsican usurper or their new egalitarian neighbors. They bought slaves whom James Bowie and his business partner, Jean Lafitte, were smuggling into Louisiana from the West Indies after the prohibition of 1809. They drained swamps and felled forests and later laid log roads and railway tracks for steam engines across acreage that was so black and rich with sediment from the alluvial fan of the Mississippi that any kind of seed would grow on it if the seed were simply thrown on the ground and stepped upon. Like his predecessors, Julian LaSalle was a practical man who did not argue or contend with the world. Perhaps his family had built its wealth upon the backs of slave labor, but that had been the ethos of the times and he felt no guilt about it. He paid what was considered a fair wage to his field hands, saw to their medical care, always kept his word, and during the Great Depression never turned a man in need from his door. As a little boy I saw him when my father took me with him to Provost's Bar and Pool Room. Mr. Julian, as we called him, was a dark-haired, handsome man with a cleft chin, who wore suspenders and linen suits and Panama hats and two-tone shoes, like an American you might see at a Havana racetrack. He never sat at the bar but always stood, a cigar in one hand, a tumbler of bourbon and ice in the other. On Saturday afternoons Provost's was always filled with both business and blue-collar men, the floor spread
with green sawdust, sometimes littered with football betting cards. Mr. Julian treated all the patrons there with equal respect, bought drinks for the old men at the domino and bouree tables, and walked away whenother men used racist language or told bawdy jokes. He was wealthy and educated, but his graciousness and good nature inspired in others admiration rather than envy. There were stories about his involvement with black women, one in particular, but someone was always quick to offer that Mr. Julian's wife suffered from cancer and other illnesses and had been in a sanitarium in the North, that her hysterical behavior at Mass was such that even a sympathetic priest had reluctantly asked her not to attend. Who could expect Mr. Julian to abide what even the church could not? But Batists sister did not begin her story with Mr. Julian. Instead she told of an overseer on Poinciana Island, a lean, rough-grained, angular man who wore sunglasses, western boots, a straw cowboy hat, and khaki clothes when he sat atop his horse and rode among the black workers in the fields. The year was 1953, a time when the white overseer on a Louisiana plantation had the same powers over those in his charge as his antebellum antecedents did. No one knew his origins, but his name was Legion, and the first day he appeared in the field one worker, who had been a convict on Angola Farm, looked into Legion's face and at first opportunity leaned his hoe against a fence rail and walked seven miles back to New Iberia and never returned to ask for his pay. "You say his name was Legion?" I asked Batist's sister. "That's the name he give us. Didn't have no first name, didn't have no last name. We didn't even have to call him 'Mister.'Just 'Legion,'" she replied. He believed clothes kept the heat off the body, and he buttoned his shirt at the throat and wrists, no matter howhumid and hot the weather became. The back of his shirt was peppered with sweat by midday, and while the blacks ate their sandwiches of company-store balogna and potted meat in a grove of gum trees, he tethered his horse under a solitary live oak in the middle of a pepper field and sat in a folding chair a black man hand-carried to him for that purpose. He ate the boudin or pork chops and dirty rice the blacks said a prostitute at Hattie Fontenot's bar prepared and wrapped in wax paper for him each morning. He took the girls and women he wanted from the field, indicating with a nod of the head for one of them to follow his horse into a canebrake or pine thicket, where he dismounted from the saddle and stripped nude and told me girl or woman to remove her underpants and lie down and open her legs, his language as mechanical and dehumanized as the violence of his copulation and the release of his animus as he plunged inside the girl or woman, his upper torso propped up stiffly on his arms, as though he did not want to touch any more of her body than was necessary. Afterward the girl or woman had to wash him. His body was as rough as animal hide, they said, welted with knife scars, the insides of his forearms blue with tattoos that looked like the crudely drawn figures in old black-and-white movie cartoons. Then the day came when his eyes settled on Ladice Hulin. "Go up yonder in them gum trees and sit in the shade," he said. "I got to pick to the end of the row, suh. Then I got the other row. Or I'm gonna come up short," she said. He reached down and lifted the cloth sack out of her hand and tied its loose end to his saddle pommel. "The pepper juice giving you blisters. You need to soak your hands in milk at night. It gonna take the sting right out," he said. "They don't be hurting, Legion. I promise. I got to get my row," Ladice said. This time he didn't reply. He turned his horse in a circle and came up behind her and let the horse's forequarters knock against her. "Legion, my daddy expecting to see me this afternoon. He coming down from the quarters. I got to be out here in the row where he can see me," she said. "You ain't got a daddy, girl. Don't make me ax you again, no," Legion said. The other workers, bent over in the pepper bushes, never looked up from their own fear and grief with the sun and heat and blistered fingers and the ball of pain that grew steadily in the small of the back through the long afternoon. Ladice wiped the dust and sweat off her face with her dress and began the walk to the gum trees in whose midst was a thorn bush, one with deep green leaves and red flowers that looked like drops of blood in the hot shade. She heard a car honk on the road. She turned and saw Mr. Julian in his Lincoln Continental, its whitewall tires and wirewheels gleaming in the sunlight, like a shining invention that had appeared out of a cloud. He got out in the road, wearing a long-sleeved white shirt with purple garters on the sleeves and seersucker pants and a Panama hat on the back of his head. His smile was wonderful, and he was looking at her, his face filled with goodness, the influence of his presence so immediate that Legion dropped her sack to the ground and dismounted from the saddle and led his horse toward the road, so his employer would not be forced to look up at him and address him on horseback. The easy smile never left Mr. Julian's face, but she could hear his words drifting across the rows on the wind. "I'm surprised to see you bump a young woman with your horse like that, Legion. I suspect that was an accident, wasn't it?" he said. "Yes, sir. I tole her I was sorry about that," Legion said. "That's good. 'Cause you're a good man. Let's don't have a conversation like this again." Ladice picked up her sack and got back in the row and stooped over and began picking the peppers whose juice sometimes caused her hands to swell as though they had been stung by bumblebees. She glanced sideways at Mr. Julian, at the way he held himself, the cleft in his chin, the sheen on his hair when he removed his hat, his red tie blowing over his shoulder in the wind. Physically, Legion towered over Mr. Julian, but Legion stood in silence, like a chastised child, motionless, while Mr. Julian unsnapped the cover on his gold vest watch and looked at the time and snapped the cover shut again, then began discussing a deep-sea fishing trip he wanted to take. While he talked his eyes remained fastened on Ladice. "Don't be t'inking you special, girl. Don't be that kind of fool," an old woman in the next row said. A week later Mr. Julian gave Ladice a job in the big house and new dresses to wear to work and the apartment over the garage to live in. She knew the price he would extract but did not think less of him for it. In fact, his obvious need, his male dependency, the fact that he wanted her, that he had chosen her out of all the women in the quarters, that any night he would come for her, all his weaknesses exposed, these thoughts made her cheeks burn and her breath rise like a shard of glass in her chest. She entertained herself with fantasies as she worked in the ornate silence of his house, dusting the antique chairs that were never sat in, placing cut flowers in a large silver bowl on a dining room table that was never used, listening for the little bell by Mrs. LaSalle's bedside, the only lifeline the old woman had to the world beyond her bedroom. The Negro boys who had courted Ladice only a week earlier seemed part of a distant memory now, one of parked cars behind juke joints and insects humming in the hot darkness or a hurried coupling on a stale-smelling mattress in a corncrib. She sensed a new power in herself among all those who lived by the rules and strange parameters that governed life on Poinciana Island. On her first visit to the plantation store after moving up to the big house, the clerk called her "Miss Ladice," and Legion and another white man stepped aside when she crossed the gallery to the parking lot. It was during her second week at the big house, just after sunset, when she was fresh from her bath and dressed in clean clothes, that she heard the weight of Mr. Julian's footsteps on the garage apartment stairs. Her hand moved to the switch for the outside light. "There's no need to turn that on. It's only I," he said through the screen door. She stood still, her hands folded demurely in front ofher, unsure whether she should act first by pushing open the door for him, wondering if even that small a courtesy would indicate a foreknowledge about his behavior that he would find insulting and presumptuous. When she didn't speak, he said, "Am I disturbing you, Ladice?" "No, suh, you ain't. I mean, you aren't." She held the door open. "Would you like to come in, suh?" "Yes, I couldn't sleep. I left Miz LaSalle's window open so I could listen for her bell. I understand you've graduated from high school." "Yes, suh. I went t'ree years at plantation school and one at St. Edward's." "Have you thought about college?" "The closest for colored is Southern in Baton Rouge. I ain't got th
e money for that." "There're scholarships. I could help with one," he said. But he was not hearing his own words now. His eyes lingered on her mouth, the thickness of her hair, her skin that was as smooth as melted chocolate, the lovely heart shape of her face. She saw him swallow and an expression like both shame and lust suffuse his face. His hands cupped her shoulders, then he bent toward her and kissed her cheek and let his hands slip down her arms and over her waist and onto the small of her back. "I'm a foolish old man who has little in the way of a married life, Ladice. If you wish, I'll leave," he said. "No, suh. You ain't got to go. I mean, you don't got to go," she replied. He kissed her neck and touched the points of her breasts with his fingers and unbuttoned her shirt and blue jeans. He helped her slip her shirt off her arms and held one of her hands while she stepped out of her jeans, then walked her to the narrow bed in the room off the kitchen and unhooked her bra and laid her down on the bed and removed her panties. "Mr. Julian, ain't you gonna use somet'ing?" she asked. "Yes," he said, his voice hoarse, the folds of flesh in his throat red and bewhiskered in the moonglow through the window. There was a sadness in his eyes she had never seen in a white person's before. "You feel bad about somet'ing, Mr. Julian?" "What I do is a sin. I've made you part of it, too." She took his hand and flattened it on her breast. "Feel my heart beating? It ain't a sin when a woman's heart beats like that," she said, and held him with her eyes. He sat on the edge of the mattress and kissed her stomach and the insides of her thighs and put her nipples in his mouth, then he entered her and came within seconds, his back shaking while she stroked the curly locks of hair on the back of his neck. "I'm sorry. I didn't give you satisfaction," he said. "It's all right, suh. Lie on your back. Let me show you somet'ing," she said. Then she mounted him and lifted his sex and placed it inside her and closed her knees and thighs tightly against him. She looked into his eyes in a way she had never dared look at a white man, probing his thoughts, controlling his sensations with the movements of her loins,leaning down to kiss him as she might a child. She came at the same time as he and she felt a surge of power and electricity in her thighs and genitalia and breasts that made her cry out involuntarily, not as much in pleasure as with a sense of triumph she never thought she could experience. Through the window she heard the tiny bell ring in Mrs. LaSalle's bedroom. "I always fix Mrs. LaSalle a sandwich and a glass of milk at this time of night," he said. "I can do it, suh." "No, your duties are in the downstairs of the house. That's where you work and remain, Ladice, unless I'm away and Mrs. LaSalle calls you." There was a sharpness in his voice that made her blink. She covered herself with the sheet and pulled her knees up in front of her. She had only to look into his eyes for a second to realize that a transformation had taken place in him since his moment of need had passed. He began dressing, his face composed now, his chin pointed upward while he buttoned his shirt. Ladice stared into the shadows and removed a strand of hair from her forehead, her lips slightly pursed, her eyes veiled. Then she lay back on the pillow with one arm behind her head and watched him prepare to leave. "Good night, Ladice," he said. She looked at him indifferently and did not answer. You gonna be back. Won't be long, either. See who talks down to who next time, she said to herself.