“Take a deep breath,” Eli said. “I think these poor bastards were ripe befo’ they went into the water.”
He peeled back the tarp, first off the barrel, then off the contents that had been piled outside it. I stepped back from the stench and the cloud of bottle flies and the crabs skittering on the sand.
“A fisherman hung his anchor on the cinder blocks,” he said. “You ever work one like this?”
“No, sir,” I said.
“Think it was a chain saw?”
“That’d be my guess.”
“One has gold hair,” Eli said. “Know who that might be?”
“Ray Haskell.”
“Who is he?”
“An ex-cop. A hard case. Called himself a PI. I think he was just a dirty cop.”
“How about this other guy?”
“Timothy Riordan. Same history.”
“Why would a picture of your house be in the phone?” Eli said.
“Which guy was carrying it?”
“The one still got part of a suit coat on.”
“That’s Haskell. He was the one with the brains.”
“You ain’t answered my question.”
“They were bird-dogging me. I got in their face about it. They probably wanted to square it.”
“Bird-dogging you why?”
“You got me,” I said, avoiding his eyes. “Neither one of them was real bright.”
“Don’t know anyone who might want to do this to them?”
I shook my head and looked out at the bay.
“Wish you had your shield back, Dave.”
“I’m not a big loss to the department.”
“You’re not holding back on me, are you?”
“No, sir,” I said.
Eli was a good guy but not someone you talked with about the realities of the system we served and the corruption that hovered on its edges. I moved upwind from the body parts that had been poured from the barrel. I tried not to think about how these men had died. Were they alive when they were cut up? Did they weep? Did they betray each other? I had seen men cry out for their mothers in a battalion aid station. Did these men do the same?
“What are you thinking about?” Eli asked.
“Nothing worth talking about.”
“What are you not telling me, podna?”
“These guys worked for Mark Shondell. Talk to him if you like.”
There was a beat. “Mr. Shondell is involved in this?”
I didn’t answer. Eli’s face had gone empty. “Dave, I’m axing you again. We’re talking about the Mr. Shondell that lives in New Iberia?”
“The one and only.”
He looked past me at the levee. His eyes were dead. Then he saw an automobile coming on the levee. “There’s the coroner now. You been real he’pful. Coming out and all. I’ll be checking wit’ you later.”
The next evening Clete called me from New Orleans. It was dark outside, the rain drumming so hard on the roof I could hardly hear his voice. “Hey!” he said.
“Hey, what?”
“A musician on Bourbon told me Johnny Shondell and Isolde Balangie were recording for three days in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. A place called Fame Studios.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“How?” he asked.
“Penelope Balangie told me.”
“She called you?”
“She was in New Iberia.”
“What’s going on, big mon?”
“Nothing. End of subject,” I said. “You heard about those two PIs?”
“Yeah, I was all broke up.”
“Has anybody tried to question you?”
“Because I had a run-in with them?”
“Because one of them put a knife in you,” I said.
“I’m keeping myself unavailable. Let’s get back to Penelope Balangie. You’re not letting those lovely tatas get to you, are you?”
“Will you lay off that?”
“I know what you mean. My Jolly Roger never gets out of control, either.”
“I’m not going to have this kind of discussion with you, Clete.”
“I know you, Streak. You run into a broad with her heart on your sleeve, and suddenly, it’s boom-boom time on the bayou. They’re in Bay St. Louis.”
“I can’t keep up with what you’re saying. Who’s in Bay St. Louis?”
“Johnny Shondell and Isolde Balangie. This musician friend of mine says they’re in a rich guy’s place on the beach. The guy is some kind of geek who’s big stuff in the music world.”
“I told Penelope Balangie I’m out. I meant it.”
“Regarding the two fuckheads who ended up Vienna sausage? Somebody wrote down my license number after I busted them up in the motel. NOPD has been knocking on doors and asking around. A couple of them still want to do some payback for a few things I did back in the eighties.”
“Get out of town for a while.” I could hear static on the line but no voice. “Clete?”
“You advise me to hide?” he said. “That’s the best you can do?”
“We need to sit this one out.”
“Stop pretending.”
“About what?”
“We both know what happened to those guys. That was a greaseball hit. It’s the same way Johnny Roselli went out. They cut off his legs and put an ice pick in his stomach so his barrel wouldn’t float up. I bet both those guys took one in the stomach. Right or wrong?”
I didn’t answer.
“Told you,” he said.
“And?” I said disingenuously.
“And nothing,” he said. “See you around.”
“Where are you now?”
“A dump in Holy Cross.”
“Give me the address.”
“I’ll hump my own pack on this one, Dave.”
“You’re really making me mad, Clete.”
He gave me the address of the hotel where he was staying. I knew the place well. He was right: It was a dump, the kind where you paid cash and slept off hangovers when you couldn’t afford a detox unit. “Bring some eats, will you?” he said. “It’s pouring here.”
There was something I wanted to tell him real bad. But I was too embarrassed. It’s funny how Clete could read my mind. “You want to get something off your chest, Streak?” he said.
“I’m having ‘warning dreams.’ Stormy seas, a galleon with convicts chained to the oars. They look like they’re in hell.”
“You just scared the shit out of me.”
“How?”
“I’ve had the same dream.”
I felt like he had kicked me in the stomach.
Chapter Seven
It was still raining hard when we drove into Mississippi the next morning. The house that Clete’s musician friend had told him about was a sun-faded pink art deco place stuck back in a cove where a desiccated shrimp boat lay on its side in a slough overgrown with vines and palm and persimmon trees. A half-dozen vehicles were parked in the driveway or partially on the grass. I thought I could hear music playing.
Clete parked the Caddy and cut the engine, the rain hitting like drops of lead on the convertible’s top. Out of a clear sky on the southern horizon, jagged bolts of lightning struck the water without making a sound. “Something keeps eating on me,” Clete said.
“We got ourselves in the cook pot,” I said. “What’s new about that?”
“This is different. Everything we’re doing. The way the world looks. Like we’re going in and out of time.”
Somehow I knew what he meant, although the right words wouldn’t form in my mouth and the right image wouldn’t come clear in my mind. The rain, the defused light, the storm debris in the waves, our visits to the homes of the Balangie and Shondell families, vicious deeds out of the past, the rip-sawed bodies packed in an oil barrel, all these things seemed part of a fantasy but one that had become real. Let me put it differently. It was like waking from a bad dream as a child only to find, as the sunlight crept into the room and drove away the shadows, that your nocturnal fears were justified and that the creatures you couldn’t flee in your sleep waited for you in the blooming of the day.