CITY AND COUNTY emergency vehicles were already at the scene when I arrived. Clete was sitting in the passenger seat of a cruiser, the door open, his feet outside on the gravel, while a plainclothes investigator interviewed him. His face looked poached, pale around the eyes. He was looking up at the investigator, who stood outside the cruiser. I could see Clete’s chest rising and falling under his oversize Hawaiian shirt. He reminded me of a guppy seeking oxygen at the top of a polluted aquarium. The paramedics had just zipped up a body bag on a corpse and were pushing the gurney toward the back of an ambulance. There was a stench in the air like smoke from burning garbage or a dead fire. The overhead lights in the parking lot glowed with a greasy iridescence inside the humidity, buzzing with a sound that made me think of blowflies. The two-lane highway the club was on threaded its way back through a place called Hellgate Canyon. The only good thing I could see in the entire scene was the absence of cuffs on Clete’s wrists.
I had to work my way through a large crowd of onlookers that had gathered behind the crime-scene tape, and show my Iberia Parish badge to a uniformed deputy to gain access to the sheriff, Joe Bim Higgins. The sheriff was not in a good mood.
“What are you doing here?” he said.
“Clete Purcel called me for backup,” I replied.
“He inserts himself into a criminal investigation and calls you instead of 911 just before he kills a man? That’s interesting. Is this the way you do business in Louisiana?”
“If Clete shot somebody, it was for a reason.”
“I’ve seen Purcel’s sheet. Your friend is rolling chaos. The victim is Quince Whitley, a guy your friend had a grudge against. Now Whitley’s brains are glued to a windshield. You think there might be a problem here?”
“Can I talk to Clete?” I asked.
“When my investigator is through with him.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t get the wrong impression. I’m fed up with both you guys.”
The ambulance made its way through the crowd and headed back through Hellgate Canyon, its siren off, its emergency lights pulsing in the darkness. I saw Candace Sweeney and Troyce sitting in the back of another cruiser, talking to a deputy in the front seat. The interior light was on, and I could see blood splatter like tiny rose petals on Candace’s blouse. Five minutes later, the investigator who had been questioning Clete put away his notepad and rejoined the sheriff. Clete walked toward me, his face empty, his green eyes locked on mine, like a drunk man who thinks the ground might cave under him at any moment.
“What happened?” I said.
“Whitley was going to toss acid in the girl’s face. J. D. Gribble threw his guitar case in front of her. Whitley pulled a hideaway and was about to drop her. So I parked one above his ear.” He widened his eyes briefly, as though his words were floating in front of him.
“Where’s Gribble?”
“He took off in Albert’s truck.”
“He doesn’t want to be a hero again?”
“He saw Troyce Nix coming out of the club. I think Gribble is the dude Nix has been looking for.”
“We need to get you a lawyer.”
“I’m clean on this one, Dave. The girl saw what happened. So did Nix. Gribble left his guitar case behind. There’s acid all over it. I’ve got a permit for the piece in five states, including Montana.”
“Higgins is pissed off. Don’t empower him. You made your statement. From this moment on, you’re deaf, dumb, and don’t know.”
“Forget Higgins. I need a drink.”
“You’re serious?”
“I just splattered a guy’s grits all over an SUV. So it’s time for a double Jack and a beer back, and that’s the way it is.” He started to walk away, then stopped and turned around. “You want a Diet Doc?”
“Tell Higgins where you’re going.”
“He’s got my piece and my keys. I can’t go anywhere. The way I see it, I’m the injured party here, not Higgins, not the dirt bag I just smoked. What’s the matter with you, Dave? You know the score. The locals can’t clean up their own shit, and they’re putting it on us. We were locking up the skells when these guys were in the 4-H Club.”
You’re wrong, Cletus, I thought. But I didn’t want to argue with him. For a lifetime, violence and the shedding of blood had been our addiction and bane. We had traded off our youth for Vietnam and had brought back a legacy of gall and vinegar that we could not rinse out of dreams. We had learned little from the past and were condemned to recommit most of its mistakes. This parking lot was perhaps just another stopping-off place in our odyssey toward the destruction of everything we loved. Clete’s cavalier attitude was a poor disguise for the ethos of blood and the heart-pounding adrenaline high of burnt cordite we had chosen for ourselves. Unfortunately, illusion is sometimes the only element that keeps us sane, and you don’t rob others of it when they need it most.
What’s the point? You don’t have to drink alcohol to stay drunk.
I saw two deputies finishing a search of the diesel-powered truck Quince Whitley had driven to the nightclub. I also saw Special Agent Alicia Rosecrans talking to them. She was not wearing the customary blue windbreaker with yellow lettering on the back that she and her colleagues usually wore when they investigated a crime scene, and she was obviously agitated by the way things were going. She made a call on her cell phone, then snapped it shut when the deputies tried to hook Whitley’s pickup to a tow truck.
“What’s the trouble?” I said, walking up to the three of them.
“Who are you?” one of the deputies asked.
“Dave Robicheaux,” I said. I already had my badge holder in my hand. I opened and closed it before he could take a good look at it. “What’d y’all come up with?”
He held up a bone-colored mask inside a large Ziploc bag. The mask was made of plastic and was shiny and ribbed with streaks of blue when the light struck its angular surfaces. “I think we may have our guy,” the deputy said.
“Which guy?” I said.
“The one who’s been killing people around here. You’re not working with Joe Bim?” the deputy said.
“I have. I’m here to help in any way I can,” I said.
“You were conducting the search without gloves, you idiot,” Alicia Rosecrans said to the deputy. “You didn’t try to obtain a telephone warrant, either. You may have already queered the evidence.”
The deputy had a brush mustache and salt-and-pepper hair. He shook his head and looked at me. “You know her?” he asked.
“Do you want to say something to me?” Alicia Rosecrans asked.
“No ma’am,” the deputy replied. He laughed to himself and looked at his partner.
“Then you’d better change your fucking attitude,” she said.
“What else did you guys find?” I asked.
“A transfer of ownership in the glove box. It looks like this guy just bought his truck from somebody named Leslie Wellstone.”
“Where was the mask?” I asked.
“Under the backseat, wrapped in an old shirt.”
“I don’t want to break in on all you swinging dicks here, but none of you are to put your hands on that truck,” Alicia Rosecrans said. “We have jurisdiction on this investigation, and as of this moment you’re out of it. In about five minutes, three people who talk like me are going to be kicking a telephone pole up your ass.”
“Yes ma’am. Whatever you say. We got it. We’re here to please. So sayonara or hasta la vista, whichever you prefer,” the deputy said, bowing slightly, his hands pressed together in prayerful fashion. “When you’re at the Asian Garden restaurant, you and your fellow agents have a big plate of shiitake on us.”
“What did you say? What did you say?” she asked.
Both deputies walked off without replying, glancing absently at the smoke that was beginning to veil the stars, and I was left alone with Special Agent Alicia Rosecrans. Her small wire-framed glasses were full of light.
“You like sexist and racist humor, Mr. Robicheaux?”
“They were out of line, but they’re not bad guys. The feds talk down to them. So they get defensive.”
“How grand and kind. I wish I had that level of humanity. It must bring you great comfort.”
Don’t take the bait, I told myself. “You had Whitley under surveillance?”
She paused as though deciding whether I was worth continuing a conversation with. “We got a report off the police band. I was a few blocks away.”
I didn’t believe her, but I let it go. “You think Whitley is the guy who tried to burn Clete?”
“Maybe. What has Clete Purcel told you?”
The fact that she didn’t refer to Clete in the familiar wasn’t insignificant. “You haven’t talked with him?” I asked.
“Someone else will be doing that.” She was looking toward the cruiser where Troyce Nix and Candace Sweeney were sitting, her eyes not meeting mine.
“Clete’s personal relationships have nothing to do with what happened here tonight,” I said. “Clete hasn’t done anything wrong. I don’t think you have, either.”
“I noticed the religious chain and medal around your neck. Are you Catholic, Mr. Robicheaux?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Have you ever considered taking a Trappist vow of silence?” she asked.
I went inside the club to find Clete. He was standing at the far end of the bar, knocking back shots from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, chasing it with a can of Bud. The customers who had come back into the club were avoiding him, and so was the bartender.
“Pouring your own drinks these days?” I said.
“Yeah, suddenly I’m butt crust.”
“Did you see your girlfriend?”
“Alicia’s here?”
“Amerasian, likes to call county cops ‘swinging dicks’? I think that might be her.”
“She get in your face about something?”
“Let’s get you out of here before the feds arrive in force.”
“What’d Alicia say to you?”
“Nothing. I think you’re nuts, that’s all.”
“I get this from you every time I meet a new woman.”
“Yeah, I think that’s what Henry the Eighth said to his confessor once.”
“What?”
I saw a red smear on the back of Clete’s thumb. I wiped it off with a paper napkin and crumpled the napkin and dropped it on the floor. He looked dumbly at the spot I had cleaned. “He fell on top of his piece. I took it out of his hand so his weight wouldn’t discharge it,” he said.
“You did everything you had to do, Clete. You saved the girl’s life and probably Gribble’s, too. No matter how this plays out, you’re the best.”
But my words were probably too late and too few. He sat down on the bar stool like an elephant that has tired of its own performance and has decided to sit down on a small chair in the middle of the ring. I could almost hear a wheeze of air from his chest. His shot glass was half empty. There was a smear of salt on his lip from his beer chaser. His eyes looked scorched in the glow of the beer sign behind the bar. “You think the feds might use this to get me for the Sally Dio plane crash?”
“Who knows? They’ve got their own agenda. They don’t share knowledge of it with others. We brass it out.”
He pinched his temples and closed and opened his eyes. “Some life, huh?”
I cupped my hand on the back of his neck. It was as hot as a sunburn. “Going up or coming down, it’s only rock and roll,” I said.
But we both knew better.