Bertie Fontenot’s dinged and virtually paint less pickup truck bounced through the ruts in the road and turned into our drive. She got out, slammed the truck door, and labored up the incline, her elephantine hips rolling inside her print-cotton dress, her big lacquered straw bag with the plastic flowers on it gripped under her arm like an ammunition box.
“What you done about my title?” she said.
“Nothing.”
“That’s all you got to say?”
“You don’t seem to accept my word, Bertie. So I’ve given up explaining myself.”
She looked away at the horse lot.
“I seen you at Ruthie Jean’s house. I thought maybe you was working on my title,” she said.
“A murder investigation.”
“Ruthie Jean don’t know nothing about a murder. What you talking about?”
“You want to sit down, Bertie?”
“You finally axed,” she said.
I helped her up the steps into the swing. She wrapped one hand around the support chain and pushed herself back and forth in a slowly oscillating arc.
“This is a nice place for your li’l girl to grow up in, ain’t it?” she said.
“Yes, it is.”
“How long your family own this?”
“The land was part of my grandfather’s farm. My father built the house in nineteen thirty.”
“How’d you like it if somebody just took it away from you, say you ain’t got no proof it was part of your gran’daddy’s farm? Run a dozer through the walls and scrape away the ground just like none of y’all was ever here?”
“You’ve got to give me some time, Bertie. I’m doing the best I can.”
She snapped open the big clasp on her bag and reached inside.
“You don’t believe Moleen after some treasure on our land, so I brought you something,” she said. “I dug these out of my li’l garden early this spring.”
One at a time she removed a series of thin eight- or nine-inch objects individually wrapped in tissue paper and bound with rubber bands. Then she rolled the rubber bands off one and peeled back the paper and flattened it against the swing.
“What you think of that?” she said.
The spoon was black as a scorched pot with tarnish, but she had obviously rubbed the metal smooth and free of dirt with rags so you could clearly see the coat of arms and the letter S embossed on the flanged head of the handle.
“That’s pretty impressive,” I said. “How deep was this in the soil?”
“From my elbow to the tip of my finger.”
“Have you shown this to anybody else?”
“No, and I ain’t going to. Not till I get a piece of paper that say that’s my land.”
“There’s an antique gun and coin store in New Orleans, Cohen’s, it’s on Royal Street. Can I take one of these spoons there if I don’t tell them where I got it?”
“You give me your word on that?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“How long that gonna take?” she said, fanning herself with a flowered handkerchief.
Chapter 14
I checked out of the office early Tuesday afternoon and drove across the Atchafalaya Basin through Baton Rouge into New Orleans. I went first to Cohen’s on Royal, whose collection of antique guns and coins and Civil War ordnance could match a museum’s, then I met Clete at his office on St. Ann and we walked through Jackson Square to a small Italian restaurant down from Tujague’s on Decatur.
We sat in back at a table with a checkered cloth and ordered, then Clete went to the bar and came back with a shot glass of bourbon and a schooner of draft. He lowered the shot into the schooner with his fingertips and watched it slide and clink down the side to the bottom, the whiskey corkscrewing upward in an amber cloud.
“Why don’t you pour some liquid Drano in there while you’re at it?” I said.
He took a deep hit and wiped his mouth with his hand.
“I had to pull a bail jumper out of a motel on the Airline Highway this afternoon. He had both his kids with him. I got to lose this PI gig,” he said.
“You did it when you had your shield.”
“It doesn’t work the same way, mon. Bondsmen dime one guy just to bring in another. The shit bags are just money on the hoof.”
He took another drink from his boilermaker and the light began to change in his eyes. “Your ME matched up the blood on the floater?” he asked.
“Yeah, it’s the guy named Jack. We got the media to sit on the story, though.” He reached across the table and pulled the tissue-paper-wrapped spoon given me by Bertie Fontenot from my shirt pocket. He worked the paper off the embossed tip of the handle.
“What’d they tell you at Cohen’s?” he said.
“It’s eighteenth-century silverware, probably cast in Spain or France.”
He rubbed the ball of his thumb on the coat of arms, then stuck the spoon back in my pocket. “This came off the Bertrand plantation, you say?” he said.
“Yep.”
“I think you’re pissing up a flagpole, Streak.”
“Thanks.”
“You don’t see it.”
“See what?”
“I think you’ve got a hard-on for this guy Bertrand.”
“He keeps showing up in the case. What am I supposed to do?”
“That’s not it. He’s the guy whose shit don’t flush.”
“He’s dirty.”
“So is the planet. Your problem is Marsallus and the meres and maybe Johnny Carp. You got to keep the lines simple, mon.”
“What do you hear about Patsy Dapolito?” I said, to change the subject.
“I thought I told you. He’s in jail in Houston. He told the plastic surgeon he’d put his eye out if he messed up the job.”
“The ME said the guy named Jack was probably terrified when he caught the two nine-millimeters.”
“You mean terrified of Sonny Boy?” he said.
“That’s the way I’d read it.”
“There’s another side to that guy, Streak. I saw him make a couple of captured army dudes, I mean they were real grease balls guys with children’s blood splattered on their boots, so they probably had it coming, but you don’t get something like that out of your memory easy — he made them scoop out a grave in the middle of a trail with pie plates and kneel on the edge, then from six inches he blew their brains all over the bushes with a .44 Magnum.”
Clete shook the image out of his face, then held up his empty shot glass at the bartender.
He’d had six boilermakers by the time we finished dinner. He started to order another round. His throat was red and grained, as though it were wind chafed.
“Let’s get some coffee and beignets at the Cafe du Monde,” I said.
“I don’t feel like it.”
“Yeah, you do.”
“Ole Streak, swinging through town like a wrecking ball, pretending everything’s under control. But I love you anyway, motherfucker,” he said.
We walked under the colonnade of the French Market, then had coffee and pastry at the outdoor tables. Across the street, in Jackson Square, the sidewalk artists were still set up along the walkway, and at the end of the piked fence that surrounds the park you could see a gut-bucket string band playing adjacent to the cathedral. I walked with Clete back to his office and sat with him on the edge of a stone well in the courtyard while he told me a long-winded story about riding with his father on the father’s milk delivery route in the Garden District; then the lavender sky began to darken and swallows spun out of the shadows and when the lights in the upstairs apartments came on I could see the alcohol gradually go out of Clete’s eyes, and I shook hands with him and drove back to New Iberia.