That evening, Clete Purcel pulled his Caddy to the curb one house down from ours and walked back across our yard to the front door, tapping softly, as though preoccupied about something. When I answered the door, I could see the Caddy in the shadows, a solitary spark of red sunlight showing through the live oaks that towered over it. The air was humid and warm, the trees along the bayou pulsing with birds. Clete untwisted the cellophane on a thin green-striped stick of peppermint candy and put it in his mouth. “Where’d you get the cuts on your face?” he asked.
“A situation in Lafayette. Why’d you park up the street?”
“I’ve got an oil leak.”
“I thought you were in New Orleans. Come inside.”
“I think NOPD still wants to hang Frankie Giacano’s murder on me. I’ll be at the motor court. I’ll see you later. I just wanted to tell you I was back in town.”
Through the gloom, I could see someone sitting in the passenger seat, even though the top was up. “Who’s with you?”
“A temp I put on.”
“What kind of temp?”
“The kind that does temporary jobs.”
“A guy tried to take my head off with a cut-down yesterday. He was using double-aught bucks. Lafayette PD thinks it was a guy I helped send away about ten years ago. A retired plainclothes named Jesse Leboeuf may have sicced him on me.”
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“Who’s in the Caddy, Clete?”
“None of your business. Is this guy Leboeuf connected to Pierre Dupree or any of this stuff with Golightly and Grimes and Frankie Gee?”
“Leboeuf is Pierre Dupree’s father-in-law.”
“This guy is like a stopped-up toilet that keeps backing up on the floor. I think maybe we should do a home call.”
“Better listen to the rest of it,” I said.
We sat down on the gallery steps, and I told him about the shooting by Varina Leboeuf’s apartment in Bengal Gardens, the heisted freezer truck that the shooter and his driver had used, the connection between the Leboeufs and Pierre Dupree and a group called Redstone Security, and the key-chain fob cast in the miniature shape of a sawfish carried by Jesse Leboeuf.
“And there was a sawfish on that old wreck that used to drift up and down the continental shelf?” Clete said.
“I’m sure of it.”
“Leboeuf is a crypto-Nazi or something?”
“I doubt if he could spell the word,” I said.
“This isn’t connecting for me, Dave. We’re talking about the emblem on a Chris-Craft that kidnapped the Melton girl and now about a sawfish on a submarine and a key chain? And the guy with the key chain is the father-in-law of a guy who’s part Jewish?”
“That pretty much sums it up.”
“The shooter suspect, this guy Ronnie Earl Patin, is not in custody, right?”
“Right.”
“You make him for the shooter?”
“I saw him for maybe two seconds before he fired into my windshield. The Ronnie Earl Patin I sent up the road was a blimp. The guy in the freezer truck wasn’t. Who’s in the Caddy, Clete?”
“My latest squeeze. She works for the Humane Society and adopts pathetic losers like me.”
I laid my arm across his shoulders. They felt as hard and solid as boulders in a streambed. “Are you getting in over your head, partner?”
“Will you stop that? I’m not the problem here. It’s you that almost caught a faceful of buckshot. Listen to me. This deal has something to do with stolen or forged paintings. They go into private collections owned by guys who want power over the art world. They not only want to own a rare painting, they want to make sure nobody ever sees it except them. They’re like trophy killers who hide the cadavers.”
“How do you know all this?”
“It’s no secret. There’s a criminal subculture that operates in the art world. The clientele are greedy, possessive assholes and are easy to take over the hurdles. Golightly had e-mails from well-known art fences in Los Angeles and New York. I confirmed the names with NYPD and a couple of PIs in L.A.”
“It’s not just stolen artwork. It’s bigger than that,” I said.
“Like what?”
“What do you know about this Redstone Security group?”
“They’re out of Galveston and Fort Worth, I think. They did a lot of government contract work in Iraq. I’ve heard stories about their people indiscriminately killing civilians.”
“Can I meet your temp?”
“No, she’s tired. What’s this obsession over my temp?”
“Jimmy the Dime called me. He told me Count Carbona gave you a lead on your daughter.”
“Jimmy the Dime should keep his mouth shut.”
“What are you up to, Clete? You think you can change the past?”
“You got to ease up on the batter, Streak. In this case, the batter is me.”
“If that’s the way you want it,” I said.
He crunched down on the peppermint stick and chewed a broken piece in his jaw, making sounds like a horse eating a carrot, his eyes never leaving mine. “We almost died out there on the bank of the bayou, where we used to have dinners on your picnic table. Know why? Because we trusted people we shouldn’t. That’s the way it’s always been. We turned the key on the skells while the white-collar crowd kicked a railroad tie up our ass. That’s not the way this one is going down. Got it, big mon?”
Early the next morning Clete and Gretchen ate a breakfast of biscuits and gravy and fried pork chops and scrambled eggs at Victor’s Cafeteria on Main and then drove to Jeanerette down the old two-lane state road that followed Bayou Teche through an idyllic stretch of sugarcane and cattle acreage. Her window was down, and the wind was blowing her hair over her forehead. There was a thin gold chain around her neck, and she was fiddling with the icon attached to it. “It’s beautiful here,” she said.
“The fishing is good, too. So is the food, maybe even better than New Orleans.”
“You sure you want to ’front this guy at his house?”
“Stonewall Jackson used to say ‘Mislead, mystify, and surprise the enemy.’”
“That’s great stuff as long as you have fifty thousand rednecks stomping ass for you.”
“Is that the Star of David?” he asked.
“This?” she said, fingering the gold chain. “My mother is Jewish, so I’m at least half. I don’t know what my father was. He could have been a Mick or a Swede, because neither my mother nor anybody in her family has reddish-blond hair.”
“You go to temple?”
“Why are you asking about the Star of David?”
“Barney Ross and Max Baer both wore it on their trunks. I don’t know if they went to temple or not. Maybe they wore it for good luck. Is that why you wear it? That’s all I was asking.”
“Who are Max Baer and Barney Ross?” she said.
“Never mind. Look, we’re going into St. Mary Parish. Pierre Dupree owns another home in the Garden District in New Orleans. I suspect he’s here. This place looks like the United States, but it’s not. This is Dupree turf. The rest of us are tourists. You don’t want to get pinched here. I have to ask you something.”
“Go ahead.”
“You know what ‘wet work’ is?”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“I’ve had people ask me to do it.”
“Did you?”
“No. I run an honest business. I don’t work for dirtbags, and I don’t jam the family of a skip in order to bring him in. What I’m asking you is did you know some bad guys in Little Havana, maybe some guys who got you into the life? Did you maybe do some stuff you don’t feel good about?”
“I didn’t know who Ernest Hemingway was until I moved to Key West and visited his house on Whitehead Street,” she said. “Then I started reading his books, and I saw something in one of them I never forgot. He said the test of all morality is whether you feel good or bad about something the morning after.”
“I’m listening,” he said.
“The only time I felt bad about anything was when I didn’t get even for what people did to me,” she said. “By the way, I don’t like that term ‘in the life.’ I was never ‘in the life.’”
Clete passed a plantation on the Teche that had been built miles downstream in 1796 and brought brick by brick up the bayou in the early 1800s and reassembled on its present site. Then he entered the spangled shade of live oaks that had been on the roadside for over two hundred years, and passed a second antebellum plantation, one with enormous white columns. He crossed the drawbridge and drove by a trailer slum and entered the small town of Jeanerette, where time seemed to have stopped a century ago and the yards of the Victorian homes along the main street were bursting with flowers, the lawns so blue and green and cool in appearance that you felt you could dive into them as you would into a swimming pool. Clete approached the home of Pierre Dupree and turned in to the gravel lane that led to the wide-galleried entrance of the main house, the gigantic oak limbs creaking above.
“Every time I visit a place like this, I always wonder how things would have worked out if the South had won the war,” Clete said.
“How would things have worked out?” Gretchen asked.
“I think all of us, white and black, would be picking these people’s cotton,” he replied.
They stepped out of the Caddy onto the gravel, the trees swelling with wind, a few yellow oak leaves tumbling through the columns of sunlight. In back they heard a dog bark. Clete rang the chimes on the front door, but no one answered. He motioned to Gretchen, and the two of them walked through the side yard to the rear of the house, where a gazebo stood on a long stretch of green lawn that sloped down to the bayou. An elderly man was training a yellow Lab down the slope, a reelless fishing rod clenched in his hand. By the corner of the house, inside a cluster of philodendron, Clete noticed a stack of wire tender traps. “May I help you?” the elderly man said.
“I’m Clete Purcel, and this is my assistant, Miss Gretchen,” Clete said. “I’d like to talk to either Alexis or Pierre Dupree about a man who claimed to have taken a betting marker out of an office safe that used to belong to Didoni Giacano.”
“Did Mr. Robicheaux send you here?”
“I sent myself here,” Clete said. “Frankie Giacano and his friends tried to extort me with that same betting marker. Are you Alexis Dupree?”
“I am. It’s customary to phone people in advance when you plan to visit their home.”
“Sorry about that. Frankie Gee got himself capped, Mr. Dupree. But I don’t think he got capped over this business with the marker. I think it has to do with stolen or forged paintings that a guy named Bix Golightly was fencing. You know anything about that?”
“I’m afraid I don’t. Would you like to sit down? Can I get you something to drink?” Alexis Dupree said. His gaze shifted from Clete to Gretchen.
“We’re fine,” Clete said.
Dupree picked up a pie plate from a redwood table and a small sack of dry dog food. He walked down the slope as though Clete and Gretchen were not there and set the pie plate on the grass and sprinkled several pieces of dog food in it. He carried the fishing rod in his left hand. The Labrador retriever was sitting in the sunlight on the opposite side of the lawn but never moved. “Come,” Alexis Dupree said.
The dog started across the grass. “Stop,” Dupree said. The dog immediately sat down. “Come,” Dupree said. The dog took another few steps, then stopped again upon command. “Come,” Dupree said.
When the dog advanced, its attention remained upon Dupree and not the pie plate. “Stop,” Dupree said. He looked up the slope at Clete and Gretchen, then at the white clouds drifting across the sky, then at a flock of robins descending on a tree. His lips were pursed, his regal profile framed against a backdrop of oaks and flowers and Spanish moss and a tidal stream and a gold-and-purple field of sugarcane. “Come,” he said again. This time he let the dog eat.
“Is he telling us something?” Gretchen whispered.
“Yeah, don’t let a guy like that ever get control of your life,” Clete said.
From out front, Clete heard the sound of a car coming up the gravel drive, then a car door slamming.
“Mr. Dupree, somebody tried to kill my friend Dave Robicheaux,” Clete said. “It was right after he left the home of Jesse Leboeuf. Your family and Jesse Leboeuf are mixed up with a group called Redstone Security, Inc. These guys have the reputation of stink on shit. You know who I’m talking about?”
“Your passion and your language are impressive, but no, I know nothing about any of this,” Dupree said. He approached Gretchen with a fond expression, the fishing rod still in his hand, his gaze drifting to her throat. “Are you Jewish?”
“What’s it to you?” she said.
“It’s a compliment. You come from a cerebral race. I also suspect you’re part German.”
“What she is, is one hundred percent American,” Clete said.
“Clete says you were in a death camp,” Gretchen said.
“I was at Ravensbruck.”
“I never heard a Jew call his religion a race,” she said.
“You seem like a very perceptive young woman. What is your name?”
“Gretchen Horowitz.”
“I hope you’ll come by again. And you don’t need to call in advance.”
“Mr. Dupree, we didn’t come out here to talk about religious matters,” Clete said. “People you and your grandson are associated with may be involved in several homicides, including a girl who floated up in a block of ice a little south of here. Are you reading me on this, sir?”
Before Dupree could answer, Clete heard footsteps behind him. He turned around and looked at perhaps one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. She did not seem to notice either his or Gretchen’s presence; instead, she was staring at Alexis Dupree with a level of anger Clete would never want directed at him. “Where’s Pierre?” she said.
“In Lafayette at his art exhibit. He’ll be so sorry he missed you,” Dupree said.
“Who are you?” the woman said to Clete.
“A private investigator,” he replied.
“You came to the right place.” She started to speak to Dupree, then she turned again to Clete. “You’re Dave Robicheaux’s buddy, aren’t you?”
“That’s right.”
“I’m Varina Leboeuf. You tell Dave if he ever humiliates my father again like he did yesterday, I’m going to beat the shit out of him.”
“If Dave Robicheaux busted your old man, he had it coming,” Clete said.
“What are y’all doing here?” she said.
“You need to butt out, ma’am,” Gretchen said.
“ What did you say?”
“We’re having a conversation with Mr. Dupree. You’re not part of it,” Gretchen said.
“I’ll tell you what, young lady. Why don’t you and this gentleman ask Mr. Dupree about these wire traps stacked in the flower bed? Alexis places them all over the property every two or three weeks. The madwoman who used to own this wretched dump fed every stray cat in the parish. Alexis hates cats. So he baits and traps them and has a black man drop them at night in other people’s neighborhoods. Most of them will starve to death or die of disease.”
“Did you mention we don’t have a local animal refuge?” Dupree said.
“I just left the office of Pierre’s lawyer. If your grandson tries to fuck me on the settlement, I’m going to destroy all of you,” Varina said.
“You’ve certainly arrived here in a charming mood,” Dupree said.
“What are you doing with my dog? Pierre said he’d run away.”
“He did. But he came back home. He’s a brand-new dog now,” Dupree said.
“Come here, Vick,” Varina called.
The dog rested its jowls on its paws and did not move.
“Vick, come with Mommy. Come on, fella,” she called.
The dog seemed to shrink itself into the grass. Alexis Dupree was smiling at her, the fishing rod trembling slightly with the palsy that affected his hand. His gaze moved back to Gretchen and the lights in her hair and the thin gold chain. “Please accept my apologies for the behavior of my grandson’s wife,” he said. “Did your family emigrate from Prussia? Few people know that Yiddish is a German dialect. I suspect you’re aware of that, aren’t you?”
Gretchen looked at Clete. “I’ll wait in the car,” she said.
“Did I say something wrong?” Dupree asked, his eyes dropping to Gretchen’s hips and thighs as she walked away.
“Don’t let that old guy get to you,” Clete said to her in the Caddy.
“I felt like he wanted to peel off my skin.”
“Yeah, he’s a little strange.”
“ He’s a little strange? How about the broad?”
“She seemed pretty normal to me.”
“She has a broom up her ass.”
“So?”
“You couldn’t keep your eyes off her. That’s the kind of woman you’re attracted to?”
“You work for me, Gretchen. You’re not my spiritual adviser.”
“Then act your fucking age.”
“I can’t believe I’m listening to this,” Clete said.
She stared at the rusted trailers in the slum by the drawbridge and the children in the dirt yards and the wash flapping on the clotheslines. The Caddy rumbled across the steel grid on the drawbridge. “I don’t know why I said that. I feel confused when I’m with you. I don’t understand my feelings. You really aren’t trying to put moves on me, are you?”
“I already told you.”
“You don’t think I’m attractive?”
“I know my limitations. I’m old and overweight and have hypertension and a few drinking and weed issues. If I was thirty years younger, you’d have to hide.” He accelerated the Caddy toward New Iberia, lowering his window, filling the inside of the car with the sound of wind. “We’re going to get you a badge,” he said.
“A badge for what?”
“A private investigator’s badge. At a pawnshop and police-supply store in Lafayette,” he said. “Anybody can buy a PI badge. They’re bigger and shinier and better-looking than an authentic cop’s badge. The trick to being a PI is gaining the client’s confidence. Our big enemy is not the skells but the Internet. With Google, you can look down people’s chimneys without ever leaving your house. Most reference librarians are better at finding people and information than I am.”
“Yeah, but you don’t just ‘find’ people.”
“Here’s the reality of the situation. I’ve got certain powers not because I’m a PI but because I run down bail skips for two bondsmen. I’m not a bondsman, but legally, I’m the agent and representative of people who are, so the powers given them by the state extend to me, which allows me to pursue fugitives across state lines and kick down doors without a warrant. I have legal powers an FBI agent doesn’t have. For example, if a husband and wife are both out on bond and the husband skips, Wee Willie and Nig can have the wife’s bond revoked in order to turn dials on the husband. I don’t do stuff like that, but Wee Willie and Nig do. You starting to get the picture?”
“You don’t like what you do?”
“I want to wear a full-body condom when I go to work. Pimps and pedophiles and dope dealers use my restroom and put their feet on my office furniture. They think I’m their friend. I try not to shake hands with them. Sometimes I have to. Sometimes I want to scrub my skin with peroxide and a wire brush.”
“It’s a job. Why beat up on yourself?”
“No, it’s what you do after you’ve flushed your legitimate career. The only time you actually help out your clients is in a civil suit. The justice system doesn’t work most of the time, but civil court does. This guy Morris Dees broke the Klan and a bunch of Aryan Nation groups by bankrupting them in civil court. I don’t catch many civil cases. If you work for me, you deal with the skells. That means we’ve got two rules: We’re honest with each other, and we never hurt anybody unless they deal the play. Can you live with that?”
“This is the big test I’m supposed to pass?”
He pulled to the side of the road under a shade tree, next to a pasture where black Angus were grazing in the sunlight.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“I like you a lot, and I think the world has done a number on you that no kid deserves. I want to be your friend, but I don’t have much to offer. I’m a drunk, and almost everything I touch turns to shit. I don’t care what you did before we met. I just want you to be straight with me now. You want to tell me some things down the track, that’s copacetic. If you don’t want to tell me anything down the track, that’s copacetic, too. You hearing me on all this? I back your play, you back mine. The past is past; now is now.” He brushed a strand of hair from her eye.
“I don’t get you,” she said.
“What’s to get? I love movies and New Orleans and horse tracks and Caddy convertibles with fins and eating large amounts of food. My viscera alone probably weighs two hundred pounds. When I go into a restaurant, I get seated at a trough.”
“You really like movies?”
“I go to twelve-step meetings for movie addiction.”
“You have cable?”
“Sure. I’ve got insomnia. I watch movies in the middle of the night.”
“James Dean’s movies are showing all this week. I think he was the greatest actor who ever lived.”
He restarted the Caddy and turned back onto the road, his brow furrowed, remembering the red windbreaker worn by the person he watched murder Bix Golightly. “What do you know about guns?”
“Enough so I don’t want to be on the wrong side of them.”
“We’ll stop at Henderson Swamp. I want to show you a few things about firearms.”
“I found your Beretta and disarmed it on your premises. I don’t need a gun lesson, at least not now. I’m a little tired, okay? The numbers tattooed on that old man’s forearm, they’re from the death camp?”
“Yeah, I guess. Why?”
“He made me feel dirty all over. Like when I was a little girl. I don’t know why,” she replied. “I’m not feeling too good. Can we go back to the motor court? I need to take a nap and start the day over.”
The only lead I had on the men who had tried to kill me outside Bengal Gardens was the name of Ronnie Earl Patin, a strong-arm robber I had helped put away a decade ago. Though there are instances when a felon goes down for some serious time and nurses a grudge over the years and eventually gets out and does some payback, it’s very rare that he goes after a cop or judge or prosecutor. Payback is usually done on a fall partner or a family member who snitched him off. Ronnie Earl was a sweaty glutton and a porn addict and a violent alcoholic who knocked around old people for their Social Security checks, but he had been jailing all of his adult life, and most of his crimes grew out of his addictions and were not part of vendettas. That said, would he do a contract job on a cop if the money was right? It was possible.
The driver of the freezer truck was too short to have been Ronnie Earl, and the shooter who had almost taken my head off with the cut-down had an ascetic face similar in design to a collection of saw blades. Could ten years in Angola, most of it on Camp J, have melted down the gelatinous pile that I helped send up there?
I called an old-time gunbull at Angola who had shepherded Ronnie Earl through the system for years. “Yeah, he was one of our Jenny Craig success stories,” the gunbull said. “He stayed out of segregation his last two years and worked in the bean field.”
“He went out max time?”
“He earned two months good time before his discharge. This was on a ten-bit. He could have been out in thirty-seven months.”
“What kept him in segregation?”
“Making pruno and raping fish and being a general shithead. What are you looking at him for?”
“Somebody tried to pop me with a shotgun.”
“It doesn’t sound like Ronnie Earl.”
“Why not?”
“He’s got two interests in life: sex and getting high. The guy’s a walking gland. The only reason he got thin was to get laid when he got out. Cain’t y’all send us a higher grade of criminals?”
“You think he’s capable of a contract hit?”
“You ever know a drunkard who wasn’t capable of anything?” Then he evidently thought about what he had just said. “Sorry. You still off the juice?”
“I go to a lot of meetings. Thanks for your time, Cap,” I said.
I began making phone calls to several bars in North Lafayette. A person might wonder how a sheriff’s detective in Iberia Parish would be presumptuous enough to believe he could find a suspect in Lafayette, twenty miles away, when the local authorities could not. The answer is simple: Every alcoholic knows what every other alcoholic is thinking. There is only one alcoholic personality. There are many manifestations of the disease, but the essential elements remain the same in every practicing drunk. CEO, hallelujah-mission wino, Catholic nun, ten-dollar street whore, academic scholar, world boxing champion, or three-hundred-pound blob, the mind-set never varies. It is for this reason that practicing alcoholics wish to avoid the company of drunks who have sobered up, and sometimes even get them fired from their jobs, lest there be anyone in proximity who can hear their most secret thoughts.
One bartender told me Ronnie Earl had been in his place two months back, right after his release from Angola. The bartender said Ronnie Earl looked nothing like the fat man the court had sent up the road.
“But he’s the same guy, right?” I said.
“No,” the bartender said. “Not at all.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s worse. You know how it works,” the bartender said. “A sick guy like that gets even sicker when he doesn’t drink. When he gets back on the train, he’s carrying a furnace with him instead of a stomach.”
The bartender had not seen Ronnie Earl since and did not know where he had gone.
The last bartender I called had picked me up out of an alley behind a B-girl joint in Lafayette’s old Underpass area, a one-block collection of buildings that was so stark and unrelieved, whose inhabitants were so lost and disconnected from the normal world, that if you found yourself drinking there, you could rest assured you had finally achieved the goal you long ago set for yourself: the total destruction of the innocent child who once lived inside you. The bartender’s name was Harvey. For me, Harvey had always been a modern-day Charon who turned me away from the Styx. “Every afternoon there’s a guy who comes in here who goes by Ron,” he said. “He drinks like he’s making up for lost time. One mug of beer, four shots lined up. Same order every time. He likes to flash his money around and invite the working girls over to his table. The whole rainbow, know what I mean?”
“I’m not sure.”
“He’s definitely multicultural.”
“What does Ron look like?”
“Neat dresser, good haircut. Maybe he’s been working outdoors. I remember him telling a joke. It was about Camp J or something. Does that mean anything?”
“A lot.”
“He just walked in. He’s got three broads with him. What do you want me to do?”
I glanced at my watch. It was a quarter to five. “Keep him there. I’m on my way. If he leaves, get his tag and call the locals.”
“I don’t need a bunch of cops in here, Dave.”
“Everything is going to be fine. If you have to, give Ron and his friends an extra round or two. It’s on me.”
My truck was still at the glazier’s. I checked out an unmarked car and tore down the two-lane past Spanish Lake toward Lafayette, a battery-powered emergency light clamped on the roof.
The club was a windowless box with a small dance floor and vinyl booths set against two walls. The light from the bathrooms glowed through a red-bead curtain that hung from a rear doorway. Outside, the sky was still bright, but when I entered the bar, I could barely make out the people sitting in the booths. I saw Harvey look up from the sink where he was rinsing glasses. I didn’t acknowledge him but went to the corner of the bar, in the shadows, and sat down on a stool. I was wearing my sport coat and a tie, and the flap of my coat covered the holstered. 45 clipped onto my belt. The duckboards bent under Harvey’s weight as he walked toward me. His face was round and flat, his Irish mouth so small it looked like it belonged to a goldfish. “What are you having?” he asked.
“A Dr Pepper on ice with a lime slice.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a black woman in a short skirt and a low-cut white blouse sitting on a barstool. I looked back at Harvey. “You still serve gumbo?”
“Coming up,” he said. He began fixing my drink, letting his gaze rest on a booth by the entrance. I glanced over and saw a blade-faced man and three females. Harvey placed my drink in front of me and picked up a stainless steel dipper and lowered it into a cauldron of chicken gumbo and filled a white bowl and set it and a spoon and a paper napkin in front of me. He picked up the twenty I had placed on the bar. “I’ll bring your change back in a minute. I got an order waiting over here.”
He took a frosted mug from the cooler and filled it until foam ran over the lip, then poured four shot glasses to the brim and placed the mug and all the glasses on a round tray. The work Harvey did behind a bar was not part of a mystique or of a kind most normal people would notice. But I could not take my eyes off his hands and the methodical way he went about filling the glasses and placing them on the cork-lined tray; nor could I ignore the smell of freshly drawn beer and whiskey that had not been cut with ice or fruit or cocktail mix. I could see the brassy bead in the beer, the strings of foam running down through the frost on the mug. The whiskey had the amber glow of sunlight that might have been aged inside yellow oak, its wetness and density and latent power greater than the sum of its parts, welling over the brim of the shot glasses as though growing in size. I felt a longing inside me that was no different from the desire of a heroin or sex addict or a candle moth that seeks the flame the way an infant seeks its mother’s breast.
I drank from my Dr Pepper and swallowed a piece of shaved ice and tried to look away from the tray Harvey was carrying to the booth by the front door.
“You ever see a li’l boy looking t’rew the window at what he cain’t have?” the black woman in the short skirt said.
“Who you talking about?” I said.
“Who you t’ink?”
“This is my job,” I said. “I check out dead-end dumps that serve people like me.”
“Ain’t nothing that bad if you got a li’l company.”
“You’re too pretty for me.”
“That’s why you looking at them other ladies in the mirror? They ain’t pretty?”
“You want a bowl of gumbo?” I asked.
“Honey, what I got don’t come in no bowl. You ought to try some.”
I winked at her and lifted a spoonful of gumbo to my mouth.
“Darlin’?” she said. Her stool squeaked as she turned toward me. She was pretty. Her skin was as darkly brown as chocolate and unmarked with scars or blemishes, her hair thick and black and freshly washed and blow-dried. “Your slip is showing.”
I pulled the flap of my coat over my. 45, my eyes still on the reflections in the bar mirror.
“One of the girls in the boot’ you’re looking at is my li’l sister. I’m gonna walk over there and ax her to go outside wit’ me. We ain’t gonna have no trouble over that, are we?”
“What’s your name?”
“Lavern.”
“You need to stay where you are, Miss Lavern. I’m going to speak to an old acquaintance over there. You and your friends are going to be just fine. Maybe I can buy y’all a drink a little later. But right now y’all need to take your mind off world events. That’s Ronnie Earl Patin in the booth, isn’t it?”
“You ain’t wit’ Lafayette PD.”
“You’ve got that right.”
“Then why you come in here making t’ings hard for people who ain’t done you nothing?”
In reality, her question was not an unreasonable one. But wars are not reasonable, and neither is most law enforcement. In Vietnam, we killed an estimated five civilians for every enemy KIA. Law enforcement is not much different. The people who occupy the underside of society are dog food. Slumlords, zoning board members on a pad, porn vendors, and industrial polluters usually skate. Rich men don’t go to the injection table, and nobody worries when worker ants get stepped on.
I picked up a loose chair from a table and carried it and my drink to the booth where the man named Ron was sitting with a young white woman and one black woman and one Hispanic girl who probably wasn’t over seventeen. “What’s the haps, Ronnie Earl?” I said, setting down the chair hard.
“You’ve mistaken me for somebody else. My name is Ron Prudhomme,” the man said. He was smiling, his cheekbones and chin forming a V in his lower face, his eyes warm with alcohol.
“No, I think you and I go back, Ron. Remember when you bashed that old man with a hammer for his veteran’s check? You put a hole in his skull. I don’t think he was ever right again.”
“I don’t know who you are,” he said.
“I’m Dave Robicheaux,” I said to the two women and the girl. “I think Ronnie put a load of buckshot through my windshield.”
The man who called himself Ron Prudhomme picked up a shot glass and drank it slowly to the bottom, savoring each swallow, his expression sleepy. He took a sip from his beer mug, a sliver of ice sliding across his thumb. “If I’d done something like that, would I be hanging around town?” he asked.
“Yeah, I have to admit that one doesn’t fit,” I replied.
“It doesn’t fit because I’m not your guy.”
“Oh, you’re my huckleberry, all right. I just haven’t figured out if you’re doing contract hits now or if you’re a minor player in a group that includes Jesse Leboeuf, a retired homicide roach. You know Jesse Leboeuf? He used to put the fear of God in guys like you.”
He eased one of his full shot glasses toward me. “You want a beer back on that? If I remember, you got the same kind of taste buds I do. I think we got eighty-sixed from the same joints. The only reason you were allowed in some of the clubs was because you carried a shield.”
“I think I figured out why you’re hanging around, Ronnie. You didn’t blow town because you weren’t the hitter in the freezer truck. But you boosted the truck at the motel where you were staying. Which means you boosted it for somebody else. It seems to me you had a brother, but y’all didn’t look alike. You looked like a helium balloon with stubs for arms and legs, but your brother was trim. The way you look now. Have I got my hand on it?”
“This is all Greek to me. Unless you’re that cop who lied on the stand and sent me up the road for a ten-bit I didn’t deserve.”
“No, I’m the cop who made sure there was a short-eyes notation in your jacket,” I said. “Ladies, y’all should be especially careful about this man. His weight loss is huge, and it occurred in a very short amount of time. I suggest you make him use industrial-strength condoms, or you stay completely away from him and spread the word to your sisters. He was both a predator and a cell-house bitch in Angola and stayed in lockdown for years because he was involved in at least two gang rapes. Do y’all get tested regularly for AIDS?”
The white woman and the black woman looked at each other, then at the Hispanic girl. The three of them rose from the booth and, without speaking a word, went out the front door of the club.
“I guess this means we’re not gonna be drinking buddies,” Ronnie Earl said.
“I can hook you up now and take you to the Lafayette PD. Or I can call them and have them pick you up. Or you can give up the hitter in the freezer truck. I think the hitter was your brother.”
“I haven’t seen my brother since I went inside. I heard he was dead or living in western Kansas. I cain’t remember which it was.”
“Stand up and put your hands behind you.”
“No problem. I’ll be out in two hours. I read about that shooting. I was playing bridge in Lake Charles the day it happened. I’ve got twenty witnesses you can call.”
“I’ve got a flash for you, Ronnie Earl. It’s not me who wants to hang you out to dry. It’s Lafayette PD. They’ve got a special hard-on for child molesters around here. They don’t care how they put you away. What you’re doing is five-star dumb,” I said.
“So is everything in my life. Do what you’re gonna do, but one thing I want to clear up: I never harmed a child. The other stuff I did. The short-eyes charge was a bum beef. Y’all sent me up wit’ a bad jacket. I paid a big price for that, man.”
“That’s the breaks, Ronnie.”
“How’d you know I got AIDS?”
“I didn’t.”
“I got a cut on my wrist. When a cut doesn’t heal, does that mean something?”
My hands froze.
“Got you, motherfucker,” he said.
Sometimes the perps, even the worst of them, have their moments.
A strange phenomenon occurred while I was hooking up Ronnie Earl Patin and patting him down for weapons and jailhouse contraband. I saw the entirety of the club as though it had been freeze-framed inside a camera lens. I saw my friend Harvey, beetle-browed and head-shaved, his big arms propped on the bar, looking wanly at an Iberia cop he had picked up from a greasy pool of water, a cop who might now cost him his job; I saw the prostitute in the low-cut blouse and short skirt talking on her cell phone as she went out a side exit; I saw a handicapped man whose arms were too short for his truncated body trying to push coins into the jukebox, his fingers as inept as Vienna sausages; I saw all the sad burnt-out ends of the days and nights I had spent in bars from Saigon’s Bring Cash Alley to the backstreets of Manila to a poacher’s community in the Atchafalaya Basin, where I traded my army-issue wristwatch, one that survived the detonation of a Bouncing Betty, for a half-pint bottle of bourbon and a six-pack of hot beer. I saw all the detritus and waste and wreckage of my misspent life laid out before me, like a man flipping through his check stubs and realizing that the reminders of one’s moral and psychological bankruptcy never go away.
“You gonna bust me or not?” Patin said.
“Right now I’m not sure what I’m going to do with you,” I said. “It’s not a time for you to shoot off your mouth.”
“I’ve still got two full shot glasses on the table. You drink one, I’ll drink the other. Who’s the wiser? Come on, you know you want it. You’re just like me. I’ve cut my intake in half by getting laid every day. What do you do? And don’t lie to me. You’re one thirsty son of a bitch.”
I pushed him through the front door into the parking lot and took out my cell phone. The battery was dead. “Is your cell phone in your car?”
“I walked here. And I don’t have a cell phone. I think they’re for people who need to beat off more. I cain’t believe this is happening. You got to bum a phone off the guy you’re busting?” He started laughing uncontrollably, tears running down his cheeks.
I unlocked the manacle on one of his wrists. The sun was red and as big as a planet and starting to set behind the trees on the western side of the highway that led to Opelousas. I threaded the loose manacle through the rear bumper on my unmarked car and relocked it on Ronnie Earl Patin’s wrist, forcing him to kneel on the asphalt. “I’m going to use the phone inside. I’ll be back in a few minutes,” I said.
“You’re leaving me out here?”
“What does it look like?”
“Take me in.”
“You did eight years in Camp J, Ronnie. You probably could have snitched your way out, but you didn’t. Not many guys can say that. You’re a stand-up guy, but for me that means you’re probably a dead end. So now you’re Lafayette PD’s problem.”
“I got bad knees. I used to do floor work without pads,” he said.
“I believe it,” I said. I got my raincoat off the back floor and folded it into a square and squatted down and slipped it under his shins.
He looked up at me, his mouth twisted with discomfort. “You gonna drink my booze?”
“You never can tell,” I said.
I went back inside the club. Maybe I should have transported him down to Lafayette PD in the back of the unmarked car, even though there was no D-ring on the back floor. Maybe I should have kicked him loose and tried to follow him to his next destination. Maybe I should have pulled in the three hookers. Maybe I shouldn’t have let my cell phone battery go down, even though I later discovered the recharger problem lay in the dash-lighter connection. I dialed 911 on a pay phone and watched the handicapped man dancing with an imaginary woman in front of the jukebox. I looked for the prostitute I had offered to buy a bowl of gumbo, but she was nowhere in sight. I watched Harvey washing glasses in a sink of dirty water and wondered what would have happened if he had left me lying behind the B-girl joint at the Underpass. Would I have been a feast for jackals? Would I have been jackrolled or even beaten to death? Would I have begged for my life if someone had pointed a switchblade under my chin? All of these things were part of the menu when you were a gutter drunk.
I lifted my hand in a silent thank-you to Harvey as my 911 call was transferred to a Lafayette PD detective. The low ceiling and painted-over cinder-block walls of the club and the stink of cigarettes and urine from the restrooms seemed to squeeze the oxygen out of the room. I pulled loose my tie and unbuttoned my collar and took a deep breath. I closed and opened my eyes, the veins shrinking across one side of my head, my old problems with vertigo returning for no apparent reason. My gaze wandered to the shot glasses of whiskey that had been abandoned on Ronnie Earl’s table. Then I stared at the cigarette burns on the floor. All of them looked like the calcified bodies of water leeches. My hand made a wet noise against the phone receiver when I squeezed it.
My 911 call to the dispatcher and my conversation with the detective could not have taken over three minutes. The handicapped man was dancing to the same song that had been playing on the jukebox when I entered the club. But I knew I had swung on a slider, one that had Vaseline all over it. The black prostitute at the bar had been too cool after making me for a cop. She had realized it, too, and had become petulant and turned herself into a victim in order to muddy my perception of her behavior. You dumb bastard, I said to myself. I hung up the phone and flung open the front door.
The shot came from far down the street, from either the backseat of an automobile on the corner or a shut-down filling station behind it, one whose broken windows and empty bays lay deep in the shadow of a giant live oak. The report was a single loud crack, probably that of a scoped, high-powered rifle. Maybe the bullet struck another surface before it found its target, or maybe the powder was wet or old and had degraded in the casing. Regardless of the cause, the pathologist would later conclude that the round had started to topple when it cut a keyhole through Ronnie Earl Patin’s face and ripped out part of his skull and spilled most of his brains onto the trunk of the unmarked car.
When I got to him, my. 45 in my hand, the cooling of the late afternoon marred by dust and road noise and the smell of rubber and exhaust fumes, he was slumped sideways on his knees, like a child who fell asleep while at prayer. I stared at the traffic and at the smoke from trash fires rising into the red sun and wondered if Ronnie Earl Patin’s soul had taken flight from his body. I also wondered if his life would have been different had I not made sure he went up the road with a short-eyes in his jacket. The answer was probably no. But it’s hard to hate the dead, no matter what they have done. That’s the power they hold over us.