"Think?" I said.
"A detective talked to Father Dolan. Seems like Father Dolan has got us mixed up with the bad guys," she said.
"Why you showing me this stuff?"
"Hate to see your friend get clipped 'cause he's a poor listener. That goes for you, too, handsome."
"You're with the G?"
"We think the priest was lucky yesterday. What we can't figure is why. Max Coll is a lot of things but fuck-up isn't one of them," she said.
"You're DEA?"
She looked up into my face, her head tilted at an angle, her teeth white behind her grin. "I heard you had a cinder block for a head," she said.
"Have you had lunch yet?" I said.
"Some people are all work and no play. That's me, Robicheaux. Max Coll uses a silencer, sometimes an ice pick. You heard it first from your ex-meter maid friend at N.O.P.D."
"Right," I said.
She stuck a business card in my shirt pocket and hit me on the hip with her satchel. "See you around, darling'," she said.
I walked with her to the front door of the building and watched her get in her automobile and drive away. Helen Soileau was standing behind me.
"What's with Miss Hip-Slick?" she said.
"She's with N.O.P.D.," I said.
"The hell she is. She's a state trooper. She used to work undercover narcotics in Shreveport. She got into a firefight with some dealers about ten years ago and shot all five of them."
Later, while I was out of the office, Clete Purcel left a message that he had checked into the old motor court on East Main, one that had long served as his field office in southwest Louisiana and his home away from home. The motor court was located inside a massive bower of live oak trees and slash pines on the bayou, and when I drove through the entrance that evening I saw Clete in front of the last cottage, barechested, wearing shorts with dancing elephants on them, flip-flops, and a Marine Corps utility cap, drinking from a bottle of Dixie while he flipped a steak on a naming grill.
"Running down bail skips?" I said.
"No, I just had to get out of the Big Sleazy for a while. Gunner Ardoin is driving me nuts," he said.
"What's happening with Gunner?"
"He thinks somebody's going to clip him. Maybe he's right. So I…"
"So you what?"
"Gave him my apartment."
"Your apartment? To Gunner Ardoin?"
"His wife skipped town and left his little girl with him. What was I supposed to do? Quit looking at me like that," he said. He picked up a can of diet Dr. Pepper from an ice chest and tossed it at me.
I sat down in a canvas chair, out of the smoke from the grill. Through the trees the sunlight looked like gold foil on the bayou. A tugboat passed, its wake slapping against the bank.
"Ever hear of a button man by the name of Max Coll?" I said.
"A freelance guy out of Miami?"
"That's the one."
"What about him?"
"That black patrolwoman who answered the complaint in Ardoin's kitchen, Clotile Arceneaux? She's an undercover state trooper. She told me this guy Coll tried to kill Father Dolan yesterday," I said.
"Dolan thinks he walks on water. You might tell him the saints died early deaths."
"He's not a listener," I said.
"Yeah, like somebody else I know," Clete said.
I walked down in the trees and watched the boats pass on the bayou while Clete finished grilling his steak. On the opposite bank two black laborers were trenching a waterline while a white man in a straw hat supervised them. When I walked back out of the trees Clete was laying out two plates, paper napkins, and knives and forks on a picnic table.
"I don't want to steal your supper," I said.
"Don't worry about it. My doctor says when I die I'll need a piano crate just to put my cholesterol in," he said.
"I'm trying to find out what happened to a convict in Angola back in the fifties. A guy named Junior Crudup. He went in and never came out," I said.
"Yeah?" Clete said, dividing up his steak, looking at a woman in a bathing suit on the bow of a speedboat.
"Father Jimmie and I were at the house of Castille Lejeune Saturday evening. Lejeune got Crudup off the levee gang back in 1951. But he said he has no memory of it," I said.
"You're talking about stuff that happened a half century ago?" Clete said.
"Crudup's family got swindled out of their property."
Clete plopped a foil-wrapped potato on my plate and sat down. He looked at me for a long time. "So you think this character Lejeune is lying?" he said.
"I couldn't tell."
"Wake up, big mon. Rich guys don't care whether the rest of us believe them or not. That's why they're great liars."
"His daughter saw two kids about to fall into a fish pond. But she was afraid to climb inside a fence and get them," I said.
"Is Father Dolan part of this?"
"He took me out to the Crudup place in St. James Parish."
"This guy is playing you, Dave. He knows you don't like authority or rich people and you're a real sucker for a sob story. How about letting Dolan and the Throw-ups or whatever clean up their own shit?"
"I'm getting played? You just gave a pornographic actor your apartment. The same guy you hit in the head with a coffeepot. You go from one train wreck to the next."
"That's why I never listen to my own advice."
He drank from his bottle of Dixie beer, his green eyes filled with an innocent self-satisfaction, his jaw packed with steak.
The next morning I drove to the house of Josh Comeaux, the clerk who I believed had sold daiquiris to Lori Parks and her friends the afternoon they burned to death. He lived with his mother in a small, weathered frame house not far from the Southern Pacific railway tracks. In the front yard was a post with hooks on it, from which vinyl bags of garbage hung so they would not be torn apart by dogs before the trash pickup.
Josh pushed open the screen door and stepped out on the gallery. He was barefoot and wore recycled jeans without a belt and a black T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. A heart with a circle of thorns twisted around it was tattooed high up on his right arm. Through the screen I could see a fat woman in a print dress watching a television program.
"You come to arrest me?" he said.
"Not yet. Who bruised up your face?"
He touched the yellow-and-purple discoloration below one eye.
"Dr. Parks did. Last night. After I got off from work."
"Lori's father?" I said.
"Yes, sir. That's why I figured you were here."
"He knocked you around?"
"I went in for gas at the all-night station. He walked me out in the shadows and hit me. He was pretty mad."
"Are you telling me you confessed something to Dr. Parks?"
"Yeah. I mean yes, sir. I told him what I did."
"Before you go any farther, I need to advise you of certain rights you have, the most important of which is your right to have an attorney."
"Who is that?" the fat woman in the chair yelled through the screen.
"Just a guy, Mom," Josh said, and walked out into the yard, out of earshot from his mother. "I told Dr. Parks I sold daiquiris to Lori and her friends. They were there three times that afternoon. It's not the only time I've sold to underage kids, either. Mr. Hebert tells us not to hold up the line 'cause somebody can't find their driver's license. But what he means is on weekend nights don't pass up any business."
"Mr. Hebert is your employer?"
"Yes, sir. At least till this morning. He fired me when I told him I'd served Lori and the other girls."
"Did Lori give you an ID of any kind?"
He shook his head. "When Lori Parks wanted something, you gave it to her. She was the prettiest girl in Loreauville."
"Josh, I'm placing you under arrest. Turn around while I hook you up."
"Am I going to prison?"
"That's up to other people, partner," I said, and put him in the backseat of the cruiser, my hand on top of his head.