CISCO FLYNN WAS IN MY office the next morning. He sat in a chair in front of my desk, his hands opening and closing on his thighs.
"Out at the dock, when I told you to look at the photos? I was angry," I said, holding the duplicates of the three photographs from the buried jar.
"Just give them to me, would you?" he said.
I handed the photographs across the desk to him. He looked at them slowly, one by one, his face never changing expression. But I saw a twitch in his cheek under one eye. He lay the photos back on the desk and straightened himself in the chair.
His voice was dry when he spoke. "You're sure that's Terrebonne, the dude with the missing finger?"
"Every road we take leads to his front door," I said.
"This guy Scruggs was there, too?"
"Put it in the bank."
He stared out the window at the fronds of a palm tree swelling in the wind.
"I understand he's back in the area," Cisco said.
"Don't have the wrong kind of thoughts, partner."
"I always thought the worst people I ever met were in Hollywood. But they're right here."
"Evil doesn't have a zip code, Cisco." He picked up the photos and looked at them again. Then he set them down and propped his elbows on my desk and rested his forehead on his fingers. I thought he was going to speak, then I realized he was weeping.
AT NOON, WHEN I was on my way to lunch, Helen caught up with me in the parking lot.
"Hang on, Streak. I just got a call from some woman named Jessie Rideau. She says she was in the hotel in Morgan City the night Jack Flynn was kidnapped," she said.
"Why's she calling us now?"
We both got in my truck. I started the engine. Helen looked straight ahead, as though trying to rethink a problem she couldn't quite define.
"She says she and another woman were prostitutes who worked out of the bar downstairs. She says Harpo Scruggs made the other woman, someone named Lavern Viator, hide a lockbox for him."
"A lockbox? Where's the Viator woman?"
"She joined a cult in Texas and asked Rideau to keep the lockbox. Rideau thinks Scruggs killed her. Now he wants the box."
"Why doesn't she give it to him?"
"She's afraid he'll kill her after he gets it."
"Tell her to come in."
"She doesn't trust us either."
I parked the truck in front of the cafeteria on Main Street. The drawbridge was up on Bayou Teche and a shrimp boat was passing through the pilings.
"Let's talk about it inside," I said.
"I can't eat. Before Rideau got panicky and hung up on me, she said the killers were shooting craps in the room next to Jack Flynn. They waited till he was by himself, then dragged him down a back stairs and tied him to a post on a dock and whipped him with chains. She said that's all that was supposed to happen. Except Scruggs told the others the night was just beginning. He made the Viator woman come with them. She held Jack Flynn's head in a towel so the blood wouldn't get on the seat."
Helen pressed at her temple with two fingers.
"What is it?" I said.
"Rideau said you can see Flynn's face on the towel. Isn't that some bullshit? She said there're chains and a hammer and handcuffs in the box, too. I got to boogie, boss man. The next time this broad calls, I'm transferring her to your extension," she said.
I SPENT THE REST of the day with the paperwork that my file drawer seemed to procreate from the time I closed it in the afternoon until I opened it in the morning. The paperwork all concerned the Pool, that comic Greek chorus of miscreants who are always in the wings, upstaging our most tragic moments, flatulent, burping, snickering, catcalling at the audience. It has been my long-held belief as a police officer that Hamlet and Ophelia might command our respect and admiration, but Sir Toby Belch and his minions usually consume most of our energies.
Here are just a few random case file entries in the lives of Pool members during a one-month period.
A pipehead tries to smoke Drāno crystals in a hookah. After he recovers from destroying several thousand brain cells in his head, he dials 911 and dimes his dealer for selling him bad dope.
A man steals a blank headstone from a funeral home, engraves his mother's name on it, and places it in his back yard. When confronted with the theft, he explains that his wife poured his mother's ashes down the sink and the man wished to put a marker over the septic tank where his mother now resides.
A woman who has fought with her common-law husband for ten years reports that her TV remote control triggered the electronically operated door on the garage and crushed his skull.
Two cousins break into the back of a liquor store, then can't start their car. They flee on foot, then report their car as stolen. It's a good plan. Except they don't bother to change their shoes. The liquor store's floor had been freshly painted and the cousins track the paint all over our floors when they file their stolen car report.
THAT EVENING CLETE AND I filled a bait bucket with shiners and took my outboard to Henderson Swamp and fished for sac-a-lait. The sun was dull red in the west, molten and misshaped as though it were dissolving in its own heat among the strips of lavender cloud that clung to the horizon. We crossed a wide bay, then let the boat drift in the lee of an island that was heavily wooded with willow and cypress trees. The mosquitoes were thick in the shadows of the trees, and you could see bream feeding among the lily pads and smell an odor like fish roe in the water.
I looked across the bay at the levee, where there was a paintless, tin-roofed house that had not been there three weeks ago.
"Where'd that come from?" I said.
"Billy Holtzner just built it. It's part of the movie," Clete said.
"You're kidding. That guy's like a disease spreading itself across the state."
"Check it out."
I reached into the rucksack where I had packed our sandwiches and a thermos of coffee and my World War II Japanese field glasses. I adjusted the focus on the glasses and saw Billy Holtzner and his daughter talking with a half dozen people on the gallery of the house.
"Aren't you supposed to be out there with them?" I asked Clete.
"They work what they call a twelve-hour turnaround. Anyway, I go off the clock at five. Then he's got some other guys to boss around. They'll be out there to one or two in the morning. Dave, I'm going to do my job, but I think that guy's dead meat."
"Why?"
"You remember guys in Nam you knew were going to get it? Walking fuckups who stunk of fear and were always trying to hang on to you? Holtzner's got that same stink on him. It's on his breath, in his clothes, I don't even like looking at him."
A few drops of rain dimpled the water, then the sac-a-lait started biting. Unlike bream or bass, they would take the shiner straight down, pulling the bobber with a steady tension into the water's darkness. They would fight hard, pumping away from the boat, until they broke the surface, when they would turn on their side and give it up.
We layered them with crushed ice in the cooler, then I took our ham-and-onion sandwiches and coffee thermos out of the rucksack and lay them on the cooler's top. In the distance, by the newly constructed movie set, I saw two figures get on an airboat and roar across the bay toward us.
The noise of the engine and fan was deafening, the wake a long, flat depression that swirled with mud. The pilot cut the engine and let the airboat float into the lee of the island. Billy Holtzner sat next to him, a blue baseball cap on his head. He was smiling.
"You guys on the job?" he said.
"No. We're just fishing," I said.
"Get out of here," he said, still smiling.
"We fish this spot a lot, Billy. We're both off the clock," Clete said.
"Oh," Holtzner said, his smile dying.
"Everything copacetic?" Clete said.
"Sure," Holtzner said. "Want to come up and watch us shoot a couple of scenes?"
"We're heading back in a few minutes. Thanks just the same," I said.
"Sure. My daughter's with me," he said, as though there were a logical connection between her presence and his invitation. "I mean, maybe we'll have a late-night dinner later."
Neither Clete nor I responded. Holtzner touched the boat pilot on the arm, and the two of them roared back across the bay, their backdraft showering the water's surface with willow leaves.
"How do you read that?" I said.
"The guy's on his own, probably for the first time in his life. It must be rough to wake up one morning and realize you're a gutless shit who doesn't deserve his family," Clete said, then bit into his sandwich.
THE NEXT DAY TWO uniformed city cops and I had to arrest a parolee from Alabama by the swimming pool at City Park. Even with cuffs on, he spit on one cop and kicked the other one in the groin. I pushed him against the side of the cruiser and tried to hold him until I could get the back door open, then the cop who had been spit on Maced him and sprayed me at the same time.
I spent the next ten minutes rinsing my face and hair in the lavatory inside the recreation building. When I came back outside, wiping the water off my neck with a paper towel, the parolee and the city cops were on their way to the jail and Adrien Glazier was standing by my pickup truck. Out on the drive, among the oak trees, I saw a dark blue waxed car with two men in suits and shades standing by it. Leaves were swirling in eddies around their car.
"The sheriff told us you were here. How's that stuff feel?" she said.
"Like somebody holding a match to your skin."
"We just got a report from Interpol on the dwarf. He's enjoying himself on the Italian Riviera."
"Glad to hear it," I said.
"So maybe the shooter who did Ricky Scar left with him."
"You believe that?" I asked.
"No. Take a walk with me."
She didn't wait for a reply. She turned and began walking slowly through the trees toward the bayou and the picnic tables that were set under tin sheds by the waterside.
"What's going on, Ms. Glazier?" I said.
"Call me Adrien." She rested her rump against a picnic table and folded her arms across her chest. "Did Cisco Flynn confess his involvement in a homicide to you?"
"Excuse me?"
"The guy who got chucked out a hotel window in San Antonio? I understand his head hit a fire hydrant. Did Cisco come seeking absolution at your bait shop?"
"My memory's not as good as it used to be. Y'all have a tap on his phone or a bug in his house?"
"We're giving you a free pass on this one. That's because I acted like a pisspot for a while," she said.
"It's because you know Harpo Scruggs was a federal snitch when he helped crucify Jack Flynn."
"You should come work for us. I never have any real laughs these days."
She walked off through the trees toward the two male agents who waited for her, her hips undulating slightly. I caught up with her.
"What have you got on the dwarfs partner?" I asked.
"Nothing. Watch your ass, Mr. Robicheaux," she replied.
"Call me Dave."
"Not a chance," she said. Then she grinned and made a clicking goodbye sound in her jaw.
THAT NIGHT I WATCHED the ten o'clock news before going to bed. I looked disinterestedly at some footage about a State Police traffic check, taken outside Jeanerette, until I saw Clete Purcel on the screen, showing his license to a trooper, then being escorted to a cruiser.
Back in the stew pot, I thought, probably for violating the spirit of his restricted permit, which allowed him to drive only for business purposes.
But that was Clete, always in trouble, always out of sync with the rest of the world. I knew the trooper was doing his job and Clete had earned his night in the bag, but I had to pause and wonder at the illusionary cell glue that made us feel safe about the society we lived in.
Archer Terrebonne, who would murder in order to break unions, financed a movie about the travail and privation of plantation workers in the 1940s. The production company helped launder money from the sale of China white. The FBI protected sociopaths like Harpo Scruggs and let his victims pay the tab. Harpo Scruggs worked for the state of Louisiana and murdered prisoners in Angola. The vested interest of government and criminals and respectable people was often the same.
In my scrapbook I had an inscribed photograph that Clete had given me when we were both in uniform at NOPD. It had been taken by an Associated Press photographer at night on a Swift Boat in Vietnam, somewhere up the Mekong, in the middle of a firefight. Clete was behind a pair of twin fifties, wearing a steel pot and a flack vest with no shirt, his youthful face lighted by a flare, tracers floating away into the darkness like segmented neon.
I could almost hear him singing, "I got a freaky old lady name of Cocaine Katie."
I thought about calling the jail in Jeanerette, but I knew he would be back on the street in the morning, nothing learned, deeper in debt to a bondsman, trying to sweep the snakes and spiders back in their baskets with vodka and grapefruit juice.
He made me think of my father, Aldous, whom people in the oil field always called Big Al Robicheaux, as though it were one name. It took seven Lafayette cops in Anders Pool Room to put him in jail. The fight wrecked the pool room from one end to the other. They hit him with batons, broke chairs on his shoulders and back, and finally got his mother to talk him into submission so they didn't have to kill him.
But jails and poverty and baton-swinging cops never broke his spirit. It took my mother's infidelities to do that. The Amtrak still ran on the old Southern Pacific roadbed that had carried my mother out to Hollywood in 1946, made up of the same cars from the original Sunset Limited she had ridden in, perhaps with the same desert scenes painted on the walls. Sometimes when I would see the Amtrak crossing through winter fields of burned cane stubble, I would wonder what my mother felt when she stepped down on the platform at Union Station in Los Angeles, her pillbox hat slanted on her head, her purse clenched in her small hand. Did she believe the shining air and the orange trees and the blue outline of the San Gabriel Mountains had been created especially for her, to be discovered in exactly this moment, in a train station that echoed like a cathedral? Did she walk into the green roll of the Pacific and feel the water balloon her dress out from her thighs and fill her with a sexual pleasure that no man ever gave her?
What's the point?
Hitler and George Orwell already said it. History books are written by and about the Terrebonnes of this world, not jarheads up the Mekong or people who die in oil-well blowouts or illiterate Cajun women who believe the locomotive whistle on the Sunset Limited calls for them.