“I’m saying this was a bad idea,” Clete said. “Look, I was there. Patsy Dap violated my friend’s person, you know what I’m saying? That’s not acceptable anywhere, not with your people, not with ours. He got what he deserved. You don’t see it that way, Johnny, it’s because you’re fifty-two cards short of a deck. And don’t ever put your fucking hand on me again.”
Five minutes later, under the porch, we watched Johnny Carp in drive his Lincoln through the light rain toward the parking lot exit. He had rolled down the tinted windows to let in the cool air, and we could see Patsy Dapolito in the passenger seat, his face and shaved head like a bleached-out muskmelon laced with barbed wire.
“Hey, Patsy, it’s an improvement. I ain’t putting you on,” Clete yelled.
“You’re a terrific intermediary, Clete,” I said.
“The Giacanos are scum, anyway. Blow it off. Come on, let’s go out under the shed and throw a line in. Wow, feel that breeze,” he said, inhaling deeply, his eyes filling with pleasure at the soft twilit perfection of the day.
Clete was probably the best investigative cop I ever knew, but he treated his relationships with the lowlifes like playful encounters with zoo creatures. As a result, his attitudes about them were often facile.
The Giacanos never did anything unless money and personal gain were involved. The family name had been linked repeatedly to both a presidential assassination and the murder of a famous civil rights leader, and although I believed them capable of committing either one or both of those crimes, I didn’t see how the Giacanos could have benefited financially from them and for that reason alone doubted their involvement.
But Johnny didn’t do a sit-down with a rural sheriff’s detective to prevent a meltdown like Patsy Dapolito from getting off his leash. Dapolito was morally insane but not stupid. When his kind stopped taking orders and started carrying out personal vendettas, they were shredded into fish churn and sprinkled around Barataria Bay.
Johnny Carp’d had another agenda when he came down to Morgan City. I didn’t know what it was, but I was sure of one thing — one way or another, Johnny had become a player in Iberia Parish.
Jason Darbonne was known as the best criminal lawyer in Lafayette. He had the hard, grizzled body of a weight lifter and daily handball player, with thick upper arms and tendons like ropes in his shoulders. But it was his peculiar bald head that you remembered; it had the shape and color of an egg that had been hard-boiled in brown tea, and because he had virtually no neck, the head seemed to perch on his high collar like Humpty-Dumpty’s.
A cold front had gone through the area early Wednesday morning, and the air was brisk and sunny when I ran into him and Sweet Pea Chaisson on the courthouse steps.
“Hey, Dave,” Sweet Pea said. “Wait a minute, I forgot. Is it your first name or your last name I ain’t suppose to use?”
“What’s your problem this morning?” I said.
“Don’t talk to him,” Darbonne said to Sweet Pea.
“I didn’t even know y’all sliced up my top till I went through the car wash. The whole inside of my car got flooded. Then the female attendant picks up this rubber that floats out from under the seat. I felt like two cents.”
“What’s your point?” I said.
“I forgot to pay my State Farm. I’m gonna be out four t’ousand dollars. It ain’t my way to go around suing people.” He brushed off Darbonne’s hand. “Just give me the money for the top and we’ll forget it.”
“You’ll forget it? You’re telling me I’m being sued?” I said.
“Yeah, I want my goddamn money. The inside of my car’s ruined. It’s like riding around inside a sponge.” I started inside the courthouse.
“What’s the matter, there’s something wrong with the words I use you don’t understand?” he said.
His webbed, birdlike eyes focused earnestly on my face.
“I had nothing to do with damaging your car. Stay away from me, Sweet Pea,” I said.
He pressed the few stands of hair on his head flat with the palm of his hand and squinted at me as though he were looking through a dense haze, his mouth flexing in disbelief. Darbonne put his hand on Sweet Pea’s arm.
“Is that a threat, sir?” he asked.
“No, it’s just a request.”
“If you didn’t do it, that fat fuck did,” Sweet Pea said.
“I’ll pass on your remarks to Purcel,” I said.
“You’re a public menace hiding behind a badge,” Darbonne said. “If you come near my client again, you’re going to wish your name was Job.”
Two women and a man passing by turned and looked at us, then glanced away. Darbonne and Sweet Pea walked out to a white Chrysler parked by the curb. The sun reflected hotly off the tinted back window like a cluster of gold needles. Darbonne was poised by the driver’s door, waiting for an opportunity to open it in the traffic, his nostrils dilating at something in the breeze.
I walked toward him, looked across the Chrysler’s roof into his surprised face.
“When I was a patrolman in New Orleans, you were a prosecutor for the United States attorney’s office,” I said.
His hand was poised in midair, his sunglasses hanging from his fingers.
“What happened to you, sir?” I said.
He turned his face away from me and slipped his sunglasses on his nose, but not before I saw a level of injury in his eyes that I had not anticipated.
Helen Soileau sat on the corner of my desk. She wore a pair of tan slacks and a pink short-sleeve shirt.
“I took Marsallus’s diary home last night and read it till two this morning,” she said. “He’s pretty good with words.”
“Sonny’s not easy to put in one shoe box,” I said.
“Have you got all the paperwork on him?”
“Pretty much. None of it’s very helpful, though. I got his family’s welfare file if you want to look at it.”
“What for?”
“No reason, really.”
She picked up the folder from my blotter and began glancing through it.
“His mother was a prostitute?” she said.
“Yeah, she died of tuberculosis when he was a kid. His father was a blind man who sharpened knives and scissors on a grinder he used to wheel up and down Villere Street.”
Helen put the folder down.
“In the diary he talks about some songwriters. He quotes a bunch of their lyrics,” she said. “Joe Hill and Woody Guthrie. Is Woody Guthrie related to Arlo?”
“Woody was his dad. Woody and Joe Hill wrote songs about farm migrants, the early unions, that sort of thing.”
“I don’t get it,” she said. “What?”
“Marsallus, he’s not a wise guy He doesn’t think like one. The stuff in that diary, it bothers me.”
“You mean the massacres in those villages?”
“Was that really going on down there?” she said. “Everyone who was there tells the same story.”
“Marsallus said something about the nature of memory that I couldn’t stop thinking about. ‘My cell partner told me today my head’s like a bad neighborhood that I shouldn’t go into by myself.’ There was a time in my life when I was the same way. I just didn’t know how to say it.”
“I see,” I said, focusing my eyes at a point mid distance between us. She bounced her fingertips on the file folder.
“You want to go to lunch?” I said.
“No, thanks. Say, where’s the portable cluster fuck these days?”