I nod absently, try to avoid looking at my watch.
“You bother me, big mon,” he says.
“Don’t start it, Clete.”
“It’s not Sonny’s death. It’s not getting canned from your department, either. Even though that’s what you want me to think.”
“I’m not up to it.” I splay my fingers in the air.
“The big problem is one that won’t go away, Dave. You can’t accept change. That’s why you always got a firestorm inside you, that’s why you ripped up Patsy Dap. You got to ease up, noble mon. You don’t have a shield anymore. You smoke the wrong dude, you go down on a murder beef. Take it from a cat who’s been there.”
“I think I’ll go back to the bait shop now,” I say.
“Yeah, I guess you better.”
“I apologize for my attitude. You’ve been a real friend about this partnership.”
“No big deal. My business in New Orleans is going down the drain, anyway.”
Outside, the rain is blowing in the sunlight. When I look back through the office window, Clete is drinking coffee, staring at nothing, alone in the silence, a new, virtually unused white telephone on his army surplus desk.
I feel a pain in my chest and go back inside the office. Together, we walk down Main to Victor’s for lunch.
Johnny Carp had made a pilgrimage to New Iberia, his second attempt at reconciliation. He was a mercurial head case a functioning drunk, a physiological caricature, a libidinous nightmare whose sexual habits you tried never to think about, but, most important, Johnny, like all drunks, was driven by a self-centered fear that made his kind see blood in tap water and dead men walking out of the surf.
I called Helen Soileau at the sheriff’s department.
“What’s the deal on Patsy Dapolito?” I asked.
“He has a rental dump by a pipe yard on the Jeanerette Road. Somebody popped one right through his bedroom window.”
“It was a nine-millimeter?”
“Or a .38. It was pretty beat up. Why?”
“Johnny Carp thinks Sonny was the shooter.”
“Big reach from the salt.” She paused. “Sorry,” she said.
“Sonny’s nine-millimeter is still in Possessions, isn’t it?” I said.
“I hate to admit this, but I asked that question myself. No.”
“What happened to it?”
“We didn’t charge him with carrying a concealed weapon because we busted him in Orleans Parish. So when he skated on the murder beef, he was home free and got his nine back. A Smith & Wesson, right?”
“What’s the status on Dapolito?”
“We painted his doorknobs with roach paste so he can’t go outside. Come on, Dave, what status? Even New Orleans doesn’t know how to deal with this guy. We get three or four calls a day on him. He took a leak in the washbasin at Mulate’s.”
“Thanks for your help, Helen.”
“It’s not right what the old man did. I told him what I thought, too.”
“You shouldn’t take my weight.”
She was quiet, as if she was deciding something, perhaps a choice about trust, which was always Helen’s most difficult moment.
“I’ve got an awful feeling, Streak. It’s like somebody put out a cigarette on my stomach lining. I get up in the morning with it.”
“Feeling about what?”
“They tore Delia Landry apart with their bare hands. They took down Sonny Marsallus in broad daylight. You watch your butt, you understand me?”
“Don’t worry about me.”
I heard her hand clench and squeak on the receiver.
“I’m not explaining myself well,” she said. “When I dropped those two perps, I saw my face on theirs. That’s how I feel now. Do you understand what I’m talking about?”
I told her it was her imagination, to get away from that kind of thinking. I told her Batist was waiting for me down at the dock.
My answer was not an honest one.
Later, I sat in the backyard and tried to convince myself that my evasiveness was based on concern for a friend. A physician turns his eyes into meaningless glass, shows no expression when he listens through a stethoscope, I told myself. But that wasn’t it. Her fear, whether for me or herself, had made me angry.
When you buy into premonitions, you jinx yourself and everyone around you. Ask anyone who’s smelled its vinegar reek in the man next to him.
I remembered a helicopter hovering against a fiery red ball that could have been heated in a devil’s forge, its blades thropping monotonously, the red dust and plumes from smoke grenades swirling into the air. But for those of us who lay on poncho liners, our wounds sealed with crusted field dressings and our own dried fluids, the dust was forming itself into an enormous, animate shape-domed, slack-jawed, leering, the nose a jagged hole cut in bone, a death’s head that ballooned larger and larger above the clearing and called our names through the churning of the blades, the din of voices on the ground, the popping of small-arms fire that was now part of somebody else’s war, just like the watery sound of a human voice speaking into an electric fan.
And if you did not shut out the syllables of your name, or if you looked into the face of the man next to you and allowed the peculiar light in his eyes to steal into your own, your soul could take flight from your breast as quickly as a dog tag being snipped onto a wire ring.
The sheriff called me early the next morning.
“I can’t just deal you out, Dave. You need to be told this,” he said.
“What?”
“Sweet Pea and a black woman. We’re not sure who she is yet.”
“Could you start over?” I said.
During the night a farmer had seen a cone of fire burning in an oak grove out by Cade. The heat was so intense the trees were scaled and baked into black stone. After the firemen covered the Cadillac with foam and stared through the smoke still billowing off the exploded tires, they made out the carbonized remains of two figures sitting erectly on the springs of the front seat, their lipless mouths wide with secrets that had risen like ash into the scorched air.
“The pathologist says double-ought bucks,” the sheriff said.
But he knew that was not the information I was waiting for.
“Sweet Pea had on a locket with his mother’s name engraved on it,” he said. Then he said, “I don’t have any idea who she is, Dave. Look, I’ve already tried to find Ruthie Jean. She’s disappeared. What else can I tell you? I don’t like making this damn phone call.”
I guess you don’t, I thought.
Chapter 24
I called Clete at the small house he had rented by City Park and asked him to meet me at the office on Main. When I got there the newly hired secretary was hanging a curtain on the front window. She was a short, thick-bodied blond woman, with orange rouge on her cheeks and a pleasant smile.
“Clete didn’t get here yet?” I said.
“He went for some coffee. Are you Mr. Robicheaux?”
“Yes. How do you do? I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name.”
“Terry Serrett. It’s nice to know you, Mr. Robicheaux.”
“You’re not from New Iberia, are you?”
“No, I grew up in Opelousas.”
“I see. Well, it’s nice meeting you,” I said.
Through the window I saw Clete crossing the street with a box of doughnuts and three sealed paper cups of coffee. I met him at the door.
“Let’s take it with us,” I said.
He drove with one hand and ate with the other on the way out to Cade. The top was down and his sandy hair was blowing on his forehead.
“How are you going to pay a secretary?” I said.
“She works for five bucks an hour.”
“That’s five bucks more than we’re making,” I said.