I rose before dawn the next morning and walked down to the dock to help Batist open up. I fixed chicory coffee and hot milk and heated an egg sandwich and ate breakfast by an open window above the water and listened to the moisture dripping out of the trees in the swamp and the popping of bluegill that were feeding along the edge of the hyacinths. Then the stars went out of the sky and the wind dropped and the stands of flooded cypresses turned as gray as winter smoke. A moment later the sun broke above the rim of the earth, like someone firing a furnace on the far side of the swamp, and suddenly the tree trunks were brown and without mystery, streaked with night damp, their limbs ridged with fern and lichen, the water that had been layered with fog only moments ago now alive with insects, dissected by the V-shaped wakes of cottonmouths and young alligators.
I washed my dishes in the tin sink and was about to walk back up to the house when I heard a car with a blown muffler coming down the road. A moment later Clete Purcel came through the bait shop door, wearing new running shoes, elastic-waisted, neon-purple shorts that bagged to his knees, a tie-dye strap undershirt that looked like chemically stained cheesecloth on his massive torso, and his Marine Corps utility cap turned sideways on his head.
"What d'you got for eats?" he asked.
"Whatever you see," I replied.
He went behind the counter and began assembling what he considered a healthy breakfast: four jelly doughnuts, a quart of chocolate milk, a cold pork-chop sandwich he found in the icebox, and two links of microwave boudin. He glanced at his watch, then sat on a counter stool and began eating.
"I'm jogging three miles with Barbara this morning," he said.
"Three miles? Maybe you should pack another sandwich."
"What's that supposed to mean?" he asked.
"Nothing," I replied, my face blank.
"I've done some more checking on our playboy lawyer LaSalle. If I were you, I'd take a closer look at this guy."
"Would you?"
"Big Tit Judy Lavelle says he's got a half-dozen regular pumps in the Quarter alone. She says his flopper not only has eyes, it's got X-ray vision. A female walks by and it pokes its way out of his fly."
"So what?" I said.
"So he's hinky. Sex predators can have college degrees, too. He uses people, then throws them over the gunnel. He got it on with both Barbara and Zerelda, then treated them like yesterday's ice cream. His whole family made their money on other people's backs. You see a pattern here?"
"You're saying you don't like him?"
"Talk to Big Tit Judy. She used the term 'inexhaustible needs.' Gee, I wonder what she means by that."
"I'd better get to work. How are things going with you and Barbara?"
He crumpled up a paper napkin and dropped it on his plate. He started to speak, then shrugged his shoulders, his face chagrined.
"My feelings seem a little naked?" he said.
"I wouldn't say that."
"You're sure a bum liar."
I walked with him to his car, then watched him drive down the dirt road, his convertible top down, a Smiley Lewis tape blaring from his loudspeakers, determined not to let mortality and the exigencies of his own battered soul hold sway in his life.
I went to the office, but I couldn't quite shake a thought Clete had planted in my head. His thinking and behavior were eccentric, his physical appetites legendary, his periodic excursions into mayhem of epic proportions, but under it all Clete was still the most intelligent and perceptive police officer I had ever known. He not only understood criminals, he understood the society that produced them.
When he was a patrolman in the Garden District, he busted a choleric, obnoxious United States congressman for D.W.I, and hit-and-run and had the congressman's car towed to the pound. When the congressman and his girlfriend tried to walk off to a bar on the corner of St. Charles and Napoleon, Clete handcuffed him to a fireplug.
Charges against the congressman were dropped, and one week later Clete found himself reassigned to a program called Neighborhood Outreach. He spent the next year ducking bullets and bricks or garbage cans weighted with water and thrown from roofs at the Desire, Iberville, and St. Thomas projects.
Even though Clete made constant derogatory allusions to the population of petty miscreants and melt-downs that cycles itself daily through the bail bond offices, courts, and jails of every city in America, in reality he viewed most of them as defective rather than evil and treated them with a kind of sardonic respect.
Drug dealers, pimps, sexual predators, jackrollers, and armed robbers were another matter. So were slumlords and politicians on the pad and cops who did scut work for the Mob. But Clete's real disdain was directed at a state of mind rather than at individuals. He looked upon public displays of charity and morality as the stuff of sideshows. He never trusted people in groups and was convinced that inside every reformer there was a glandular, lascivious, and sweaty creature aching for release.
After Clete made plainclothes, he worked a case involving a Garden District doyenne whose philandering husband went missing on a fishing trip down in Barataria. The husband's outboard was found floating upside down in the swamp immediately after a storm, the rods, tackle boxes, ice chest, and life preservers washed into the trees. His disappearance was written off as an accidental drowning.
But Clete learned the husband hated to drive an automobile and regularly hired taxicabs to take him around New Orleans. Clete searched through hundreds of taxi logs until he found an entry for a pickup at the husband's residence on the day he went fishing. The destination was the husband's new downtown office building. Clete also questioned a security guard at the office building and was told the wife had been installing new shelves in the basement very early on the Saturday morning her husband had disappeared.
Clete obtained a blueprint of the building and got a search warrant and discovered that behind the shelves a brick wall had been recently mortared across an alcove that was meant to serve as a storage space.
He and three uniformed patrolmen sledgehammered a hole in the bricks and were suddenly struck by an odor that caused one of them to vomit in his hands. The doyenne had not only walled up her husband in his own office building, she had hosted a dance, with a hired orchestra, right above the alcove that evening. The coroner said the husband was alive for the whole show.
Clete busted an infamous gay millionaire on Bayou St. John who fed his abusive mother to a pet alligator, helped wiretap a Louisiana insurance commissioner who went to prison for bribery, and eventually caught up with the United States congressman who had been instrumental in shipping Clete off to Neighborhood Outreach.
During Mardi Gras someone had flung a beer bottle from a French Quarter hotel window into the passing parade and had seriously hurt one of New Orleans's most famous trumpet players. Clete went down a third-floor corridor, knocking on doors, trying to approximate the probable location of the room from which the bottle had been thrown.
Then he reached the door of a large suite, marched off the distance to the end of the corridor, comparing it with the distance he had measured between the suspect window and the edge of the building outside. When he and the hotel detective were refused entrance to the suite, Clete kicked the doors open and saw the congressman amid a group of naked revelers, their Mardi Gras masks pushed up on their heads, spitting whiskey and soda on one another.
This time Clete made a call to a police reporter at the Times-Picayune right after busting the whole room.
"You think Perry LaSalle may be a sex predator?" Bootsie said that afternoon.
"I didn't say that. But Perry always gives you the feeling he's Prometheus on the bayou. Jesuit seminarian, friend of the migrants, professional good guy at a Catholic Worker mission. Except he represents Legion Guidry and has a way of involving himself with working-class girls who all think they're going to be his main squeeze."
We were in our bedroom and Bootsie was putting on eyeliner in the dresser mirror. She had just had her bath and was wearing a pink slip. Through the window I could see Alafair pouring fresh water in Tripod's bowl on top of his hutch.
"Dave?" Bootsie said.
"Yes?"
"You need to get your grits off the stove."
"I need to talk to Perry."
"About what?" she said, no longer able to suppress her irritation.
"I think he's being blackmailed by Legion Guidry. How's that for starters?"
"Are we going out to dinner?"
"Yeah, sure," I replied.
"Thanks for confirming that," she said, her eyes out of focus in the mirror.
A few minutes later we walked out on the gallery. The yard was already in shadow, and on the wind I could smell an odor like cornsilk in a field at the end of the day. It should have been a fine evening, but I knew the white worm eating inside of me was about to ruin it.
"I've got to go to a meeting," I said.
"This isn't Wednesday night," she replied.
"I'll drive to Lafayette," I said.
She turned and walked back into the bedroom and began changing out of her dress into a pair of blue jeans and a work shirt.
When I came home late that night, she had made a bed on the couch and was asleep with her face turned toward the wall.
The next morning I drove to Perry LaSalle's office on Main Street.
"He's not in right now. He went out to Mr. Sookie's camp," Perry's secretary said.
"Sookie? Sookie Motrie?" I said.
"Why, yes, sir," she replied, then saw the look on my face and dropped her eyes.
I drove deep down into Vermilion Parish, where the wetlands of southern Louisiana bleed into the Gulf of Mexico, passing through rice and cattle acreage, then crossing canals and bayous into long stretches of green marshland, where cranes and blue herons stood in the rain ditches, as motionless as lawn ornaments. I turned onto a winding road that led back through gum trees and a brackish swamp, past a paintless, wood-frame church house whose roof had been crushed by a fallen persimmon tree.
But it wasn't the ruined building that caught my eye. A glass-covered sign in the yard, unblemished except for road dust and a single crack down the center, read, "Twelve Disciples Assembly-Services at 7 p.m. Wednesday and 10 a.m. Sunday. Welcome."
I stopped the cruiser and backed up, then turned onto the church property. A dirt lane led back to an empty house, now packed to the eaves with bales of hay. A sawhorse with an old Detour sign on it lay sideways in the middle of the lane. Road maintenance equipment and a tree shredder used by parish work crews were parked in a three-sided tin shed, surrounded by water oaks and slash pine. Just past the shed was a railed hog lot that gave onto a thick woods and a dead lake. The hogs in the lot were indescribably filthy, their bristles matted with feces, their snouts glazed with what looked like chicken guts.
I tried to remember the lyrics of the song Marvin Oates was always quoting from but they escaped me. Maybe Bootsie was right, I told myself. Maybe I was so deep in my own head that I saw a dark portent in virtually everyone who had been vaguely connected with the lives of Amanda Boudreau and Linda Zeroski, even to the extent that I had actually begun to think Perry LaSalle, who had represented Linda in court, might bear examination.
I continued on down the paved road and turned onto a grassy knoll and drove through an arbor of oak and pecan and persimmon trees to an old duck-hunting camp that Sookie Motrie had acquired by appointing himself the executor of an elderly lady's estate.
He was a slight man who kept an equestrian posture and dressed like a horseman, in two-tone cowboy boots and tweed jackets with suede shoulders, to compensate for his lack of physical stature and a chin that receded abruptly into his throat. He wore a mustache and deliberately kept his hair long, combing it back over the collar in a rustic fashion, which gave him an unconventional and cavalier appearance and distracted others from the avarice in his eyes.
He had recently moved his houseboat from Pecan Island to his camp, chainsawing down twenty-five yards of cypresses along the bank to create an instant berth for his boat. Rather than haul his garbage away, he piled it in the center of the knoll and burned it, creating a black sculpture of melted and scorched aluminum wrap, Styrofoam, tin cans, and plastic.
Perry LaSalle stood under shade trees by his parked Gazelle, watching Sookie Motrie, stripped to the waist, bust skeet with a double-barreled Parker twelve-gauge over the water. The popping of the shotgun was almost lost in the wind, and neither man heard me walk up behind them. Sookie triggered the skeet trap with his foot, raised the shotgun to his shoulder, and blew the skeet into a pink mist against the sky.
Then he turned and saw me, the way an animal might when it is alone with its prey and wishes no intrusion into its domain.
"Hello, Dave!" he called, breaking open the breech of his gun, never letting his eyes leave mine, as though he were genuinely glad to see me.
"How do you do, sir?" I said. "I didn't mean to disturb y'all. I just need a minute or two of Perry's time."
"We're gonna have lunch. I got any kind of food you want," Sookie said.
"Thanks just the same," I said. "You want to shoot?" he said, offering me the shotgun. I shook my head.
"Well, I'm gonna let you gentlemen talk. It's probably over my head, anyway. Right, Dave?" he said, and winked, inferring an insult that had not been made, casting himself in the role of victim while he kept others off balance. He slipped his shotgun into a sheepskin-lined case and propped it against the back rail of his houseboat, then opened a green bottle of Heineken in the galley and drank it on the deck, his skin healthy and tan in die salt breeze that blew off the Gulf.
"What are you doing with a shitpot like that?" I asked Perry.
"What's your objection to Sookie?" "He fronts points for the casinos," I said. "He's a lobbyist. That's his job."
"They victimize ignorant and compulsive and poor people."
"Maybe they provide a few jobs, too," he said. "You know better. Why do you always have to act like a douche bag, Perry?"
"You want to tell me why you're out here?" he asked, feigning patience. But his eyes wouldn't hold and they started to slip off mine.
"You're in with them, aren't you?" I said.
"With whom?"
"The casinos, the people in Vegas and Chicago who run them. Both Barbara and Zerelda tried to tell me that. I just wasn't listening."
"I think you're losing it, Dave."
"Legion Guidry blackmailed your grandfather. Now he's turning dials on you. How's it feel to do scut work for a rapist?"
He looked at me for a long time, the skin trembling under one eye. Then he turned and walked down the grassy bank to the stern of Sookie's houseboat and lifted the shotgun from the deck railing. He walked back up the incline toward me, unzipping the case, his eyes fastened on my face. He let the case slip to the ground and cracked open the breech.
"Make another remark about my family," he said.
"Go screw yourself," I said.
He took two shotgun shells from his shirt pocket and plopped them into the chambers, then snapped the breech shut.
"Hey, Perry, what's going on?" Sookie called from the stern of his boat.
"Nothing is going on," Perry replied. "Dave just has to make a choice about what he wants to do. Right, Dave? You want to shoot? Here, it's ready to rock Or do you just want to flap your mouth? Go ahead, take it."
He pressed the shotgun into my hands, his eyes blazing now. "You want to shoot me, Dave? Do you want to roll all your personal misery and unhappiness and failure into a tight little ball and set a match to it and blow somebody else away? Because I'm on the edge of reaching down your throat and tearing out your vocal cords. I can't tell you how much I'd love to do that."
I opened the breech on the shotgun and tossed the shells into the grass, then threw the shotgun spinning in a long arc, past the bow of Sookie's houseboat, the sun glinting on the blue steel and polished wood. It splashed into water that was at least twenty feet deep and sank out of sight.
"You ought to go out to L.A. and get a card in the Screen Actors Guild, Perry. No, I take that back. You've got a great acting career right here. Enjoy your lunch with Sookie," I said.
"Are you crazy? That's my Parker. Are you guys crazy?" I heard Sookie shouting as I walked back up the knoll to the cruiser.
But any pleasure I might have taken from sticking it to Perry LaSalle and Sookie Motrie was short-lived. When I arrived home that afternoon, Alafair was waiting for me in the driveway, pacing up and down, the bone ridging in one jaw, her hair tied up on her head, her fists on her hips.
"How you doin'?" I said.
"Guess."
"What's the problem?" I asked.
"Not much. My father is acting like an asshole because he thinks he's the only person in the world with a problem. Outside of that, everything's fine."
"Bootsie told you about my breaking off our dinner plans last night?"
"She didn't have to. I heard you. If you want to drink, Dave, just go do it. Stop laying your grief on your family."
"Maybe you don't know what you're talking about, Alafair."
"Bootsie told me what that man, what's his name, Legion, did to you. You want to kill him? I wish you would. Then we'd know who's really important to you."
"Pardon?" I said.
"Go kill this man. Then we'd know once and for all his death means much more to you than taking care of your own family. We're a little sick of it, Dave. Just thought you should know," she said, her voice starting to break, her eyes glistening now.
I tried to clear an obstruction out of my throat. A battered car passed on the road, the windows down, a denim-shirted man behind the wheel, the backseat filled with children and fishing rods. The driver and the children were all laughing at something.
"I'm sorry, kiddo," I said.
"You should be," she said.
That night I lay in the dark, sleepless, the trees outside swelling with wind, the canopy in the swamp trembling with a ghostly white light from the lightning in the south. I had never felt more alone in my life. Once again, I burned, in almost a sexual fashion, to wrap my fingers around the grips and inside the steel guard of a heavy, high-caliber pistol, to smell the acrid odor of cordite, to tear loose from all the restraints that bound my life and squeezed the breath from my lungs. And I knew what I had to do.