"What happened?" I said."
"Who are you?" he said.
"A friend of Cletus Purcel."
"What's your name?"
"Dave Robicheaux."
He nodded slowly, and I saw the name meant nothing to him.
"Your friend got worked over," he said.
"He says he didn't know the two guys who did it. But the bartender who phoned us said the two guys called him by name. Tell your friend it's dumb to protect people who'll slam a man's hand in a car door."
He brushed past me and walked to the elevator. Dixie Lee and I went inside the room, which Clete shared with an elderly man who had an IV connected to his wasted arm. Clete's bed was on the far side of the partition, one end elevated so he could look up at the television set that was turned on without sound. One eye was swollen into a purple egg, and his head was shaved in three places where the scalp had been stitched. His right hand was in plaster; the ends of his fingers were discolored as though they were gangrenous.
"I heard you with the detective," he said.
"He doesn't seem to believe your story," I said.
"He's probably got marital trouble. It makes a cynic out of you. What's happening, Dixie?"
"Oh man, who did this to you?" Dixie Lee said.
"A couple of Sal's meatballs."
"Who?" Dixie Lee said.
"Carl and Foo-Foo. I got Foo-Foo one shot in the rocks, though. He's not going to be unlimbering his equipment for a while."
"What happened?" I said.
"I stopped at this bar off Ninety. They must have seen the jeep in the parking lot. They caught me with a baton when I came out the side door. When I thought they were through, they dragged me to a car and slammed my hand in the door. If the bartender hadn't come out, they'd have done my other hand."
"Tell the cops," Dixie Lee said.
"Why do you want to protect Carl and Foo-Foo?"
"What goes round, comes round," Clete said.
"I ain't sweating it, mon."
"You used to say "Bust 'em or smoke 'em." Let the cops bust them," I said.
"Maybe they've got a surprise coming out of the jack-in-the-box," Clete said. He looked at my face.
"All your radio tubes are lit up, Streak. What are you thinking about?"
"Why'd they do it?"
"Sal's running scared. He's got nobody but his old man and his hired dagos. Even the corn holers cut out on him."
"That's not it," I said.
"How do I know what goes on in his head?"
"Come on, Clete," I said.
"When I left, he owed me fifteen hundred in back salary. Plus I'd already paid my rent to him in advance. So I went in his house and took a couple of gold ashtrays."
"You crazy bastard," Dixie Lee said.
"He didn't kill Darlene, then, did he?"
"I don't know," Clete said.
"Yes, you do. Somebody shot at him. He thinks it was Charlie Dodds. If he had killed Darlene, you'd be the first person he would fear. Those two guys wouldn't have just broken your hand, either. They would have passed you on the road and taken you out with a shotgun."
"Maybe," he said.
"No maybe about it, Cletus," I said.
"It was Mapes. He thought she sent me over by the reservation where he killed the two Indians. He found her alone, and he raped and killed her. You've got a beef with the wrong guy, and you know it."
"I got a beef with Sal for all kinds of reasons," he said.
"But that's all right. Our man's going to have a sandy fuck."
"What?" I said.
"A fifties joke. Sand in the Vaseline," he said.
"Forget it. Hey, do me a favor. My jeep's still out at that bar. It's a log place, right where Broadway runs into Ninety. Take it to your house, will you? The keys are on the table. I don't want some local punks to clean it out."
"All right."
"Where's Mapes?" he said.
"You'll have to find him on your own, partner."
"You know where he is, then."
"Do you want us to bring you anything?"
"Come on, you think I'm going to get out of bed and scramble Mapes's eggs? You give me too much credit."
"You'd find a way, Clete."
He wet his mouth and smiled.
"Dixie, can you give me and Streak a minute?" he said.
"Sure."
"It's just something from our First District days," Clete said.
"I don't mind," Dixie Lee said.
"Then come on back later," Clete said.
"Don't be talking down to me. It hurts my feelings," Dixie Lee said.
"I'll come see you tomorrow."
He walked out of the room.
"He's not full of booze," Clete said.
"What do you need, Cletus?"
"I screwed up a lot of things back there in New Orleans. Blew my marriage, took juice, knocked a girl up, got into the shylocks. Then I cooled out that shit bag in the hog lot. But I paid for it. In spades. I'd like to change it but I can't. I guess that's what remorse is about. But the big one that's been eating my lunch all this time is that I could have brought that guy in and gotten you off the hook. For ten grand I helped them turn you into toilet paper."
"The lowlifes all took a fall one way or another."
"Yeah, your fourteen years with the department went down the hole, too."
"It was my choice, Clete,"
"You want to act like a stand-up guy about it, that's copacetic. But I don't buy it. I fucked you over. It's the worst thing I did in my life. I'm telling you I'm sorry. I'm not asking you to say anything. I'm telling you how I feel. I'm not bringing it up again. You were my best friend. I stuck it to you."
"It's all right. Maybe you were doing the best you could at the time."
His one open eye stared up at me. It looked like a piece of green glass in his battered face.
"It's time to write it off, partner," I said.
"That's straight?"
"Who cares about last year's box score?"
He swallowed. His eye was watery along the bottom rim.
"Fuck, man," he said.
"I have to go. Alafair is in the waiting room."
"I've got to tell you something," he said.
"What?"
"I've got to whisper it. Come here."
"What is it, Clete?"
"No, closer."
I leaned lover him, then his good hand came up, clamped around the back of my neck like a vise, and pulled my face down on his. He kissed me hard on the mouth, and I could smell the cigarettes on his breath, the salve and Mercurochrome painted on his stitches and shaved scalp.
We drove out west of town to the bar where Clete had been beaten up by Sally Dee's goons and found his Toyota jeep in the parking lot. Dixie Lee drove it back to the house, parked it in back, and locked it. A few minutes later Tess Regan called.
"Can you come over?" she said.
"When?"
"Tonight. For redfish. Didn't Alafair say anything?"
"It came out a little confused."
"I called you earlier, but nobody was home. It's nothing special, really. We could make it another night."
"Tonight's fine," I said.
And it was. The evening was cool and smelled of flowers and sprinkled yards, and she blackened the redfish on a grill in the backyard and served it in her small dining room, which glowed with the sun's reflection through the tall turn-of-the-century windows. She wore tight blue jeans and low heels, a short-sleeved blouse with tiny pink roses on it, and gold hoop earrings, but her apartment gave her away. The wood floors and mahogany trim on the doors gleamed; the kitchen was spotless; the hung pictures and those on the marble mantel were all of relatives. The wallpaper was new, but the design and color did nothing to remove the apartment from an earlier era. A Catholic religious calendar, with an ad for a mortuary on it, was affixed to the icebox door with small magnets. She had crossed two palm strands in an X behind the crucifix on the dining room wall.
After supper we did the dishes together while Alafair watched television. When her leg bumped against me, she smiled awkwardly as though we had been jostled against one another on a bus, then her eyes looked at my face with both expectation and perhaps a moment's fear. I suspected she was one of those whose heart could be easily hurt, one to whom a casual expression of affection would probably be interpreted as a large personal commitment. The moon was up now. The window was open and I could smell the wet mint against the brick wall and the thick, cool odor of lawn grass that had been flooded by a soak hose. It was the kind of soft moment that you could slip into as easily as you could believe you were indeed able to regain the innocence of your youth.