He was right. My remarks about the woman were a cheap shot. It’s easy to be righteous about people at the bottom of the food chain until you spend one day in their shoes.
“Come outside,” I said.
“I ain’t lost nothing out there.”
“Come outside or I’ll bust you right here.”
“For what?”
“Public stupidity.” I removed a pair of cuffs from my coat pocket and held them below the level of the bar where he could see them. I let my voice climb. “I’ll bust your friend, too.”
“Okay,” he said. “You’re a hardnose, Dave. You gonna pay for that, you.”
We walked through a narrow hall and a storage room full of keg and bottled beer and out into an alley lined with Dumpsters and garbage cans. Two people were copulating vertically behind a Dumpster. They took no notice of us. We walked down the alley to the side street. In the mist I could see the glow of spotlights in the town square. They stayed focused at night on the pillared courthouse and on the church that had been there since 1844 and on the Evangeline Oak and on the graveyard where I first kissed a girl named Bootsie Mouton who later became my wife.
I looked back at the couple behind the Dumpster, then took off my hat and wiped the mist off my face with a handkerchief.
“The fuck is with you, Dave?”
“Nothing.”
“You got a look like the whole world is ending.”
“Shut up and listen, Marcel. You told me the Shondell vic went out hard. You said he was a marshmallow, that he made baby sounds.”
“You get off on this?”
“What’d y’all do to him?”
“I ain’t saying. And it wasn’t me done it. I tole you I drove, nothing else.”
“Clete Purcel said you were in on the Tommy Fig hit. Y’all freeze-wrapped his parts and tied them to the ceiling fan in his shop.”
“I was sixteen years old.”
“Who did the vic molest, Marcel?”
“I don’t know.”
“You said y’all took Polaroids for Pietro Balangie?”
“Yeah, he didn’t allow molesters in the city or jackrollers in the Quarter.”
“I got that. But none of that was personal with Pietro. The whack on Gerald Shondell Levine and the photos were.”
“I ain’t getting into this, man.”
“Who was the molester’s victim, Marcel?”
“It was hearsay.”
I shoved him against a brick wall. He tried to slap my arm away. I grabbed him by the throat and pinned him hard against the bricks. His whiskers felt like wire. “Was it a child?”
“Who you t’ink molesters molest?”
“Lose the coon-ass pronunciations and theatrics.”
“You already know,” he replied.
I grabbed his lapels and banged him again and again into the wall. “I want to hear it from you. Say it!”
“The two other guys are dead. That leaves me as probably the only guy who knows who the perv put his hands and mout’ on. That’s why I’m not a reg’lar visitor to New Orleans. That’s why I went nort’ and did some work in Camden and Brooklyn. That’s why I don’t go down Memory Lane with Adonis Balangie. The painter sodomized him for five years. Use my name to Adonis and I’ll punch your whole ticket. Now get your fucking hands off me before I forget we go back.”
I began to walk away, then stopped. “Where’d y’all dump the body?”
“We put acid on it. It ain’t a body no more,” Marcel said.
“Where’d you put it?”
“I already tole you. On the nort’ side of Pontchartrain Lake.”
“The exact spot, Marcel.”
“T’ink I’m gonna tell you that?”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll just tell Mark Shondell you helped kill his cousin.”
“You’re a bum, Dave.”
“Tell me about it,” I said.
Two minutes later, I walked down the alley in the mist, alongside a rivulet of black rainwater, past the two people who had finished their coupling and were now sharing a bottle of synthetic wine. “What’s happenin’?” I said.
They looked at me fearfully.
We’re supposed to protect and serve. But sometimes we exploit and screw the most helpless of the helpless; in this instance I had used Marcel LaForchette. With no other place to put my anger, I picked up a rock and flung it against a Dumpster. I saw the couple flinch and instinctively grab each other.
I banged on Clete’s door early the next morning, the air cold and the rain dripping audibly out of the trees where the Teche had overrun its banks. He answered the door in his skivvies. “Why not wake up the whole motor court?” he said.
I stepped inside without being asked. “Get dressed.”
“For what?”
“We’re going to New Orleans. You need some rubber boots.”
“It’s Sunday.”
“Remember those stories about a place where Pietro Balangie buried his bodies?”
He sighed. “We’ve got enough problems, noble mon.”
I told him everything Marcel had said. When I finished, Clete was sitting on the side of the bed, still undressed, a coffee mug imprinted with the marine globe and anchor balanced on his thigh. “Have you told Dana Magelli about this?”
“No.”
“You’re protecting LaForchette?”
“He cooperated. He’s trying to go straight. Why jam the guy?”
“I think something else is going on here, Dave. You keep putting your necktie in the garbage grinder, starting with the Balangie woman. Now we’re about to dig up Adonis’s childhood. I think you’re on a dry drunk.”
“Not true, Cletus.”
“You’ve lost two wives. Either go to more meetings or buy a bottle of Jack. But stop messing with the Balangies.”
“Are you in or out?”
He set down his coffee cup on the nightstand and cupped his hands on his knees. “I had a dream last night.”
“Forget dreams. That’s all they are.”
“We were sliding off the edge of the earth, you and me,” he said. “I don’t know what we’re into. I’ve never felt like this in my life.”
Clete and I got in my truck and, four hours later, found the spot Marcel had described. The lake was to the south, capping in the wind, the willows bending in the inlets. To the north were warehouses, rusted oil tanks, and an obsolete sewage plant. The sky was gray, the smell of burning garbage in the wind. We stood in a sump that was like a mixture of glue and quicksand and wet cement, and began shoveling and raking and probing for a bottom with a long iron bar that once was part of a school flagpole. We did this for two hours. Our lack of procedure and legality probably seems strange. But anyone who buys in to the average television portrayal of law enforcement deserves any misfortune that happens to him. Most of us give it our best, but a lot don’t. So how do we sometimes put away the worst members of the human race? Answer: We salt the mine shaft, lie on the witness stand, conceal exculpatory evidence, and cut deals with jailhouse snitches. We also dig big holes and find nothing and bury something for our colleagues to find two days after we’re gone.
We found part of a shoe and pieces of bone that could have belonged to seagulls or small four-footed animals. Maybe some of the bone fragments could have belonged to people, but I doubted it, and the shoe could have washed ashore and been buried by a storm. In effect, the sump seemed bottomless; it would require a large forensic team and many days of labor and a huge amount of tax money to produce anything of evidentiary value.
Clete leaned on his shovel. His clothes and boots were flecked with mud and wet sand. A blister had formed on his right hand. He had not uttered a word of complaint.
“Let’s pack it up,” I said. “Sorry to get you out for this.”
“At least we know LaForchette is probably telling the truth about the hit on the perv. Maybe one day somebody will dig him up. You know anything about him?”