In the morning the rain had slackened when I arrived at work. I walked down to the sheriff's office and knocked on the door. He looked up from some papers on his desk, his face darkening. He had on a pinstripe coat and a silver cowboy shirt unbuttoned at the collar. His Stetson hung on a rack, spotted with raindrops.
"Real good of you to check in," he said.
"Sir?" I said.
"You decked Perry LaSalle?"
"He swung on me."
"Thanks for letting me know that. He's called twice. I also just got off the phone with Joe Zeroski. I want this stuff cleaned up. I'm sick of my department being dragged into a soap opera."
"What staff?" I said.
"LaSalle says Legion Guidry intends to do serious harm to Barbara Shanahan and your friend Purcel. At least as far as I could make out. In the meantime, Joe Zeroski says Marvin Oates is bothering his niece again. What the hell is going on there?"
"Zerelda Calucci deep-sixed Marvin; I think he's a dangerous man, skipper. Maybe more dangerous than Legion Guidry."
"Marvin Oates?"
"I think he broke into a woman's house in St. Mary Parish and molested her. I think he should be our primary suspect in the murder of Linda Zeroski."
I told the sheriff the story of Marie Guilbeau. He leaned back and tapped the heels of his hands on the arms of his chair. He was thinking about the case now and I could see his irritation with me slipping out of his eyes.
"I don't buy it. Oates is simpleminded. He doesn't have any history of violence," he said.
"None we know about. I want to get a warrant and take his place apart."
"Do it," the sheriff said. "Are you going to talk to Perry LaSalle?"
"What did Legion say exactly?" I asked.
"I never got it straight. LaSalle doesn't sound rational. He says this guy Guidry isn't human. What's he talking about?"
Helen Soileau went to work on the warrant while I called Perry at his office. Outside the window I could see a round blue place in the sky and birds trapped inside it. Perry's secretary said he had not come to the office yet. I called his number on Poinciana Island.
"Legion threatened Clete and Barbara?" I said.
"Yeah, on the phone, late last night. He threatened me, too. He thinks I'm writing a book about him," he replied. I could hear him breathing into the receiver.
"You told Barbara?"
"Yeah, she said she has a pistol and she's looking forward to parking one in his buckwheats."
"Did you warn Clete?" I asked.
"No."
"Why not?" I asked.
"I just didn't."
Because he's of no value to you, I thought.
"What did you say?" he asked.
"Nothing. You told the sheriff Legion wasn't human. What did you mean?"
His voice make an audible click in the phone.
"He can speak in what sounds like an ancient or dead language. He did it last night," he said.
"It's probably just bad French," I said, and quietly hung up.
I looked at the phone, my ears popping, and wondered how Perry enjoyed being lied to for a change, particularly when he was frightened to death.
I called Clete twice and got his answering machine. I left messages both times. By late that afternoon Helen and I had a warrant to search Marvin Oates's shotgun house on St. Peter Street. Marvin was not at home, but we called the landlord and got him to open the house. It had stopped raining and the sky overhead was blue and ribbed with pink clouds, but out over the Gulf another storm was building and the thunder reverberated dully through Marvin's tin roof as we dumped out all his drawers, pulled his clothes off hangers, flipped his mattress upside down, raked all the cookware out of his kitchen cabinets, and generally wreaked havoc on the inside of his house.
But we found nothing that was of any value to us.
Except five strips of pipe tape hanging loose from an empty niche in the back of the dresser, tape that was strong enough to hold a handgun in place against the wood.
"I bet that's where he hid the nine-millimeter he used to kill Frankie Dogs," I said.
"It's still hard for me to make that guy for anything except a meltdown, Dave," Helen said.
"I knew an old-time moonshiner who once told me the man who kills you will be at your throat before you ever know it," I said.
"Yeah? I don't get it," she said.
"What kind of guy could get close enough to cap Frankie Dogs?" I said.
Before I went home that evening I drove to Clete's apartment, but his blinds were closed and his car was gone. I slipped a note under his door, asking him to call me.
When I got home, the sky was maroon-colored, full of birds, the thunderheads over the Gulf banked in a long black line just above the horizon. One of Alafair's friends was spending the night and had blocked the driveway with her automobile, and I parked my truck by the boat ramp and walked up to the house. A few minutes later I looked through the front window and saw my friend, the ex-soldier, hosing down the truck, then scrubbing the camping shell in back with a long-handled push broom.
I walked back down the slope.
"There's another storm coming. Maybe you should wait on washing the truck," I said.
"That's okay. I just want to get the mud off. Then later I can just run the hose over it," he said.
"How you getting along?" I asked.
"I had a little trouble sleeping. The sound of your refrigeration equipment comes through the walls. When I put the pillow over my head, I don't hear it so much."
"You want to join us for supper?"
"That's all right, Loot. I went into town with Batist and bought some groceries," he said.
I turned to walk back to the house.
"There was an old guy here in a red pickup truck," he said. "He asked if somebody in a purple Cadillac convertible had been around. A guy named Purcel."
"What'd this guy look like?" I asked.
"Tall, with deep lines in his face. I told him I didn't know anybody named Purcel." The ex-soldier scratched his cheek and looked quizzically into space.
"What is it?" I said.
"He told me to go inside and ask the nigger. That's the word he used, just like everybody did. I told him he should watch what he called other people. He didn't like it."
"His name is Legion Guidry, Doc. He's one of those we don't let get behind us."
"Who is he?"
"I wish I knew, partner," I said.
After supper I walked out on the gallery and tried to read the newspaper, but I couldn't concentrate. The sky began to darken, and a flock of egrets rose out of the swamp and scattered like white rose petals over the top of my house, then the wind kicked up again and I heard rain clicking in the trees. I folded the newspaper and went back inside. Bootsie was reading a novel by Steve Yarbrough under a floor lamp. She closed her book, using her thumb to mark her place, her eyes veiled.
"Do you think your friend, the war vet out there, is a hundred percent?" she said.
"Probably not. But he's harmless," I replied.
"How do you know?"
"Good people don't change. Sometimes bad ones do. But good people don't."
"You're incurably romantic, Dave."
"Think so?"
She laughed loudly, then went back to her book. I walked into the kitchen, hoping she did not detect my real mood. Because the truth was my skin was crawling with anxiety, the same kind I'd experienced during my flirtation with amphetamines. But this time the cause wasn't the white worm; it was an abiding sense that my loyal friend Clete Purcel was skating on the edge of another calamity.
"Where you going?" Bootsie said.
"To Clete's. I'll be back in a few minutes," I said.
"You worried about him?"
"I've left him several messages. Clete always calls me as soon as he gets the message."
"Maybe he's in New Orleans."
"Legion Guidry was at the bait shop today. He wanted to know if Clete had been around."
Her book fell off her knee. Her reading glasses were full of light when she looked at me.
I drove to his apartment on the Loreauville Road. The underwater lights were on in the swimming pool, and the apartment manager, an elderly Jewish man who had been a teenager in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, was stacking the poolside furniture under a sheltered walkway.
"Have you seen Clete Purcel, Mr. Lemand?" I asked.
"Early this morning. He was putting his fishing things in the back of his car. A young woman was with him," he replied.
"Did he say when he might be back?"
"No, he didn't. I'm sorry," Mr. Lemand said. He was a bald, wizened man, with brown eyes and delicate hands. He always wore a tie and a starched shirt and was never seen at a dinner table without his coat on. "You're the second person who asked me about Mr. Purcel today."
"Oh?"
"A man in a red truck was here. He sat for a long time in the parking lot, under the trees, smoking cigarettes. Maybe because of your line of work you know this man," Mr. Lemand said.
"How do you mean?"
He inverted a plastic chair and placed it on a table.
"In my childhood I saw eyes like his. That was in Germany, in times quite different from our own. He wanted to know if Mr. Purcel was with Ms. Shanahan.
You know, Ms. Shanahan, who works in the district attorney's office? I didn't tell him."
"Good for you."
"Do you think he'll come back, this man in the truck?"
"Call me if he does. Here, I'll put my home number on the back of my business card," I said, and handed it to him.
"This man had an odor. At first I thought I was imagining it. But I wasn't. It was vile," he said.
His eyes searched my face for an explanation. But I had none to give him. The pool was a brilliant, clear green against the glow of the underwater lights, the surface chained with rain rings. I walked out into the darkness, into the parking lot, and started my truck.
Who else would go fishing in an electric storm or ignore the danger represented by a man like Legion Guidry? I asked myself. But that was Clete's nature, defiant of all authority and rules, uneducable, grinning his way through the cannon smoke, convinced he could live through anything.
Evidently, James Jones and Ernest Hemingway bore each other a high degree of enmity. Ironically, they both described the evolution of the combat soldier in a similar fashion. Each author said the most dangerous stage in a soldier's life is the second one, immediately after he has survived his initial experience in combat, because he feels anointed by a divine hand and convinces himself he would not have been spared in one battle only to die in another.
Clete had never evolved out of that second stage in a combat soldier's career. His great strength lay in his courage and his uncanny knowledge of his enemy. But his weakness was in direct proportion to his strength, and it lay in his inability to foresee or appreciate the consequence of his actions, or, more simply said, the fact that a cable-strung wrecking ball is designed to swing both ways.
I drove back up the Loreauville Road and crossed the drawbridge in the center of town and turned onto Burke Street, then walked up the steps to Barbara Shanahan's apartment overlooking the Teche. A lamp was on in the living room, but no one answered the bell. I hammered on the door, but there was no movement inside. I stuck a note in the doorjamb, asking her to call the house when she returned.
I drove to the motor court where Joe Zeroski and Zerelda Calucci were staying. Zerelda was not in her cottage, but Joe was, dressed in pajama bottoms, a T-shirt, and slippers, holding the door open for me, the rain blowing in his face.
"Just the guy I wanted to see," he said.
"Me?" I said.
"Yeah, this whole town ought to be napalmed. I called the sheriff at his house. He told me to talk to him during business hours. Hey, crazoids don't keep business hours. That includes Blimpo."
"Blimpo is Clete?"
"No, Nancy Reagan. Who do you think I mean?"
"You're going too fast for me, Joe." I closed the door behind me. His television set was on, a glass of milk and a sandwich on a table by an overstuffed chair.
"Purcel took my niece fishing. He didn't say where, either, which means he wants to boink her without me being around. In the meantime Marvin Dipshit is knocking on her door, with roses in his hand and this puke-pot look on his face," he said.
"When?" I asked.
"Two hours ago."
"Where is Oates now?" I asked.
"I'm supposed to know that? No wonder you people got a crime wave. Get out of here," he said.
"Joe, I think Marvin may have murdered your daughter," I said.
"Say that again."
"Marvin Oates may have molested a woman in St. Mary Parish. He keeps showing up in places he has no business at."
"When'd you start looking at this guy?" Joe said.
"He's been an unofficial suspect for some time."
"Unofficial? You got a way with words."
"I'm here now, Joe, because I'm concerned about both Clete and Zerelda. If you can help me in any way, I'll be in your debt."
An angry thought went out of his eyes. "I don't know where they're at. But I'll make some calls," he said.
"No cowboy stuff. Oates is a suspect. That's all," I said.
"You figure him for the hit on Frankie?" he said.
"Maybe."
"How could a watermelon picker like that take out Frankie Dogs? A guy who wears boots that look like they come off a Puerto Rican faggot. You ever seen anybody besides an elf or a fruit wear red and green boots?"
"When did you see him in these boots?" "Tonight. Why?"
I went back home. I tried to imagine where Clete might have gone, but I was at a loss. L called his apartment again and got the answering machine, but this time I just hung up.
"Clete always lands on his feet," Bootsie said.
"I wouldn't say that," I replied.
"You can't live his life, Dave," she said.
I went out on the gallery and sat in a chair, with the light off, and watched the rain fall on the swamp. I thought about the biblical passage describing how God makes the sun to shine and the rain to fall on both the good, and the wicked. A few miles away Jimmy Dean Styles and Tee Bobby Hulin were both housed in the parish prison, held without bond, in twenty-three-hour lockdown. I wondered if Tee Bobby had finally accepted his fate, if he looked out at the drenched sugarcane fields surrounding the stockade and saw his future there, either as a lifetime convict laborer on Angola Farm or as a hump of sod in the prison cemetery at Lookout Point, with no identification on his grave marker except a number.
I even wondered if Jimmy Dean Styles still doubted his fate. I could not imagine a worse death than being confined in a cage, knowing the exact date, hour, minute, and second you will die at the hands of others. To me it was always miraculous that the condemned did not go insane before the day of their execution.
But an old-time warden at Parchman Penitentiary in Mississippi confided to me an observation of his own that I've never forgotten. He said that no matter how pathological or evil the condemned might be, they do not believe the state will carry out its sentence. An army of correctional officers, prison psychologists, physicians, hospital attendants, prison administrators, and chaplains is assigned to the care and well-being of those on death row. They're fed, given every form of medical care, nursed back to health if they try to kill themselves, and sometimes punished, as children would be, for possessing a stinger or a jar of prune-o.
Would these same representatives of the state strap down a defenseless individual and fill his veins with lethal chemicals or create an electrical arc from his skull to the soles of his feet? My friend the warden believed the contradictions were such that no sane person could quite assimilate them.
On the far side of the swamp a bolt of lightning leaped from the earth and quivered whitely in a pool of clouds at the top of the sky. I felt the day's events wash through me in a wave of fatigue. Then the phone rang in the living room and I went inside to answer it.
It was Mr. Lemand, the manager of Clete's apartment complex.
"I'm sorry to call so late," he said.
"It's all right. Can I help you?" I said.
"A lady named Mrs. LeBlanc lives next door to Mr. Purcel. After you left, her toilet became clogged and I had to go up and fix it. Since I knew you were concerned about Mr. Purcel, I asked if she had seen him. She said he'd told her he had rented a camp at Bayou Benoit."
"Do you know where exactly?"
"No, I asked her that."
"Thanks very much, Mr. Lemand," I said.
"I'm afraid that's not all. She said a man had been looking into Mr. Purcel's window. She was disturbed at first, then she recognized the man as a Bible salesman she knew. He told her he was delivering a Bible to Mr. Purcel but hadn't been able to find him. So she told him where Mr. Purcel was."
"What you've told me is very helpful, Mr. Lemand," I said.
"Unfortunately, there's more. When she looked out her window, she saw a red pickup truck follow the Bible salesman out of the parking lot. Then she noticed the man driving the truck didn't turn on his lights until he was out on the road. She had seen this man earlier. He had a pair of binoculars. She's quite concerned she put either Mr. Purcel or the salesman in harm's way."
"She and you have done all the right things, Mr. Lemand. Tell her not to worry," I said.
"I think that will be a great relief to her," he said.
I hung up the receiver and tried to think. My own thoughts made my head hurt. Linda Zeroski had been murdered on Bayou Benoit. The nightclub where Baby Huey Lagneaux worked was on Bayou Benoit, as was Legion Guidry's camp. Of all the places Clete could choose for a tryst, it would have to be there.
I went into the bedroom and removed my army-issue.45 automatic from die dresser drawer. I dropped an extra magazine, loaded with hollow-points, and a sap and a pair of handcuffs in me pockets of my raincoat and told Bootsie I did not know when I would be back home, men walked down die slope to my truck and started the engine.
I didn't realize, until I was over a mile down the road, that I had a passenger with me.