“I’m going to hang up now,” I said.
“I thought you were a more dignified and modest man.”
“Say again?”
“You’re dressed in your underwear. That’s both unclean and immodest.”
High in the sky, lightning jumped between the clouds. There was no one in the yard. I could hear myself breathing. “Your first name is Gideon. Your last name is Richetti. You broke a pimp’s neck in the Quarter, and you gave a hooker thirty grand to start a new life. Who knows, maybe you’re not all bad. But how about losing the time-traveler charade? It’s a drag.”
“You say time traveler?” the voice said, each word coated with phlegm. “Look out the back window again, my friend.”
Then I saw the galleon slide into view in the middle of the Teche, its wood sides and oars glistening with rain, a muscular man in a brass helmet and leather vest and leather skirt beating cadence on a drum.
“Do you deny what your eyes tell you?” the voice asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“How so?”
“Because you’re a fraud of some kind. Because maybe you’re—”
“I’m what?”
“Evil,” I said. “A magician of the mind, someone who knows how to use hallucinogens on others. But ultimately a hoaxer.”
“You lie,” the voice said. “Never speak to me that way again.”
I fumbled the phone onto its cradle, my hand shaking. Then the phone fell into the sink. I jerked the cord from the base unit. The phone was completely disconnected now. But the caller’s voice rose from it, disembodied, floating in the air around me, laughing.
I went to the window. The galleon was gone. The room was tilting and spinning around as though I were caught in a vortex. I tried to walk into the bedroom, then stumbled and fell, taking a chair down with me. I woke at two in the morning, trembling as though the malaria that lived in my blood was giving me a free ride back to Vietnam, my ears filled with hissing sounds like automobile tires on a wet highway, like 105 artillery rounds arching out of their trajectory, like snakes writhing upon one another in a basket.
Chapter Eighteen
At 4:23 A.M. I was admitted to Iberia General. The diagnosis was food poisoning. I have been wounded four times, twice in Vietnam (the second time by a Bouncing Betty) and twice on the job. I have never experienced any pain, however, as bad as that produced by the botulism that attacked my system that morning. It was the kind of pain that is so bad you cannot remember how bad it was.
By nine A.M. it was gone. My first visitor was Clete Purcel, whom I called as soon as I was able. The second person I called was Carroll LeBlanc, who said, “You didn’t shag that Italian broad again, did you? Hit it and git it, Robo.”
Clete pulled a chair up to the bed, his porkpie hat on his knee. Clete never wore a hat inside a building, never walked in front of a woman through a doorway, and never failed to rise from a chair when he shook hands or when a woman entered a room. “What did you eat?” he asked.
“That’s not the problem.”
“Then what is?”
“I thought I told you on the phone.”
“You didn’t tell me anything. You kept saying, ‘We can’t get the slick in. They’re coming through the wire.’ ”
“The guy who hung you up in the Keys called me,” I said. “I saw the galleon out on the bayou.”
Clete was waving off the image before I could finish. “Don’t tell me that.”
“Okay, maybe I was out of my head.”
Clete’s right leg was pumping up and down. “The guy who called, he told you he was Gideon Richetti?”
“I addressed him by that name. He didn’t correct me.”
“Dave, I can’t take this.”
“I hit the deck minutes after his call. My memory is suspect. Nothing I say is reliable. But I’m telling you what I think I heard and saw.”
Why burden an already burdened man? I asked myself. But in truth, I wanted a rational explanation for the phone call, for the voice that rose from the disconnected receiver, for the prison ship that had wended its way out of history and up Bayou Teche. The sound of Richetti’s voice was like spittle in my ear.
“What are we going to do, Streak?” Clete said.
“Take it to them with tongs.”
“You can’t cowboy a guy like Mark Shondell.”
“I didn’t say anything about Shondell.”
“Then who are you talking about?” Clete asked.
Anyone and everyone, I thought.
“What’d you say?” Clete asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “Rhetoric is cheap. I don’t know where to start on this.”
“It’s got to be about money,” Clete said.
“Richetti gave thirty grand to a hooker.”
“Yeah, and it probably came from a robbery,” he said. “Maybe he’s trying to buy his way into heaven.”
That wasn’t a bad speculation.
I spent the rest of the day researching all disappearances and homicides in the greater New Orleans area from fifteen years before. I also talked with Dana Magelli at NOPD. The following day, Saturday, I found Marcel LaForchette in the same dump on the edge of St. Martinville’s black district where I’d found him before. He was at the end of the bar, eating fried crawfish and dirty rice with a spoon from a paper plate. A fat woman with gold hair and skin the color of paste was sitting next to him. I remembered her from somewhere. Maybe a motel raid, a drug bust, a domestic shooting, the kind of events that happen most often on the first weekend of the month. The red paint lacquered on the walls looked smoked, darker, as though it were being consumed by its own garishness.
“Lose your way to your A.A. meet again?” Marcel said.
“Your PO told me to check you out,” I replied.
“Funny man.”
“You don’t have a parole officer anymore?”
“Mr. Mark got me cut loose,” he said. “So if you’re here about him, I say beat feet, my man.”
The woman kept her face turned away from me. She was drinking from a soda can. Lipstick was smeared on the top. She stank of cigarette smoke.
“I need to talk to you,” I said to Marcel.
“Talk.”
I looked at the back of the woman’s head. She wore a frilly white blouse and a bra with black straps that showed through the fabric. Marcel stuck a tightly folded ten-dollar bill between her fingers. “Cloteel, can you get us somet’ing cold?”
“No,” she said.
“Somet’ing wrong?” Marcel said.
“If you wit’ him, you ain’t wit’ me,” she said.
She dropped the folded bill on the bar and walked to the women’s room. Her buttocks were massive, the backs of her thighs printed with the bar stool. Then I remembered her.
“She don’t mean anyt’ing by it,” Marcel said.
“Right,” I said. I leaned in close to him. “The whack you drove on? Was the hit a guy named Gerald Levine, middle name Shondell?”
“Maybe.”
“He was Mark Shondell’s cousin.”
Marcel stared at his food. “I’ve spent a lot of time with Father Julian. I’m staying off the juice and the spike and weed and everyt’ing else. The way I was before I got turned out.”
His Cajun accent had deepened, as though he wanted to regress into childhood. I wanted to be sympathetic to him. But I knew Marcel’s history, and I could only guess at the number of people he had killed.
“Is your lady friend part of your new life?”
“I don’t judge.”
“She sold her infant child for a few bags of brown skag. She cut the skag with insect poison and sold it to some teenagers.”
“She’s clean now, so you can shut down the sermon.”