Oftentimes police cases are not solved. They simply unravel, by chance and accident. With good luck there will even be an appreciable degree of justice involved, although it often originates from an expected source.
Early the next morning, Saturday, my lawn was white with frost and the bamboo on the side of the house was stiff and hard and rattled like broomsticks in the wind. I put on my sweat suit, ran three miles through City Park, then showered and drove down to Clete's cottage in the motor court.
He sat on the side of his bed in the coldness of the room, sleepy, shivering slightly, wearing only a strap undershirt and pajama bottoms. The wastebasket in his kitchen was stuffed with fast-food containers and beer cans.
"You want to do what?" he said.
"Eat breakfast at McDonald's, then maybe knock down some ducks at Pecan Island," I said.
"I'm busy today," he replied.
"I see."
It was quiet in the room. His eyes lingered on mine. "What's bothering you, big mon?" he said.
I told him about the dream, the motorman with the skeletal face, the darkness outside the streetcar, the yellowed palm fronds that clattered like bone. "You ever have a dream like that?" I said.
"I used to dream I was on a Jolly Green that was going down. But that was in the hospital in Saigon. It doesn't mean anything. It's just a dream."
"I can't shake it," I said.
He got up from the bed and began dressing. "Turn on the heat, will you? It feels like it's thirty below in here," he said.
We ate at the McDonald's on East Main. Outside, the sky was blue, the leaves of the live oak in the adjacent lot flickering in the sunlight. "Can't tempt you into a duck-hunting trip?" I said.
He wiped his mouth with a crumpled napkin and dropped it onto his plate. "That perv I told you about, Bobby Joe Fontenot, the one in the trailer court? I couldn't stop thinking about what he said to me."
"Said what?"
"That if he re offended he was going to use my name every time he stuck it to a little kid. So I called the perv's P.O. Guess what? The P.O. is on vacation. So I told the guy handling his case file about the little boy in the trailer next door. He did everything except yawn in my ear."
"Call Social Services," I said.
"I already did. I think that kid is shark meat."
He gathered up the trash from both our meals and stuffed them angrily into a bin.
"Take it easy, Cletus," I said.
"Screw the ducks. Time to spit in the punch bowl," he said.
The mother of the little boy in the trailer court was named Katie Goltz. She sat with us in her tiny living room, still not connecting the reasons we were there, even though Clete mentioned he had been chasing down a bail skip who was the fall partner of Bobby Joe Fon-tenot, a convicted sex predator living next door.
She wore no lipstick, old jeans, Indian moccasins, and a colorless pullover. Her hair was cut short, and had probably been brown before it was peroxided and waved on one side to resemble a 1940s leading lady's.
"Where's your son?" Clete said.
"At the strip mall," she replied.
Clete nodded. "He went with some friends?" he asked.
"Bobby Joe took him. To buy him a comic book for helping clean his trailer," she said.
Clete leaned forward in his chair. "Ma'am, we have a Meagan's Law in Louisiana. You must have been notified about Bobby Joe Fontenot's record," he said.
"People change," she said.
"You listen to me. That guy is a degenerate. You keep your son away from him," Clete said.
She focused her eyes on a neutral space, her hands folded in her lap. Her arms were muscular, as though she had grown up doing physical work, her complexion clear. Behind her, framed on the wall, was a black-and-white photograph of her and a man who looked like a power lifter. His hair was shaved on the sides, curly in back, his face impish, like a cartoon drawing of a monkey's.
I stood up and looked closer at the picture. It was inscribed "To Katie Gee, the girl who made my own screen role a real pleasure, Your pal, Phil."
"That's Gunner Ardoin," I said.
""Gunner' is his nickname. Phil is his real name. You know him?" she said.
"He was involved with the beating of a priest in New Orleans. You made a film with him?" I said.
She frowned, unable to process all that she just heard. "I made just one film. My screen name is Katie Gee. The producer said "Gee' looks better than "Goltz' on the credits. Phil was my co star What was that about a priest?" she said.
"You were in one of Fat Sammy Figorelli's porn films?" Clete said.
"They're art films. They're shown in art theaters. Listen, nobody has hurt my little boy. I wouldn't let that happen. I have to go to the washateria now," she said.
There seemed nothing left to say. Her mindset, formed out of either desperation, ignorance, or just plain stupidity and selfishness, was armor-plated, and in all probability no amount of attrition in her life or her son's would ever change it.
Bobby Joe Fontenot pulled up outside, wearing a foam-rubber collar, his face marbled with bruises. When the little boy got out of his car, Bobby Joe cocked his index finger at him, as though he were pointing a gun, and said, "Come over and watch some TV tonight. I got some Popsicles."
Clete and I got up to go, our mission by and large a failure. Her son rushed past us into his bedroom, a new comic book rolled tightly in his hand. Clete twisted the handle on the front door, then stopped and turned around. "It's not coincidence you let that geek be alone with your kid. There's a financial motive here, isn't there?" he said.
"Coincidence?" she said.
"You've got more than a neighborly relationship with that asshole next door. He knows you were working the trade around Folk Polk," Clete said, tapping the air with one finger. "Fontenot's in porn films, too, isn't he?"
"I'm not saying any more. I have to go to the washateria and fix lunch and do all kinds of things I don't get no help with. Why don't y'all just leave now? I didn't do anything to cause this, and you can't say I did," she said.
She stared at us indignantly, her arms folded across her breasts, as though the irrefutability of her logic should have been obvious to anyone.
Clete and I crossed the Teche on the drawbridge behind the trailer court and headed toward New Iberia on the back road, past the row of oak-shaded antebellum homes that belonged on a movie set. Then he mashed on the gas, one hand on top of the steering wheel, the sugarcane fields racing past us, a crazy light in his eyes.
"What are you thinking about, Clete?"
"Nothing. I'll drop you off," he said.
"Clete?"
"Everything is copacetic. Just hang loose. I'll check in with you later," he said. He whistled an aimless tune under his breath.
CHAPTER 21
At 10:15 Monday morning I received a call from Clotile Arceneaux. "Did you hear from the FBI yet?" she asked.
"No," I said.
"You will. They just left here. They want to put a net over Max Coll real bad," she said.
"A guy crossing state lines to commit a homicide? I guess they would."
"No, you've got it wrong. It's face-saving time. Because he's IRA, he's on a terrorist watch list. In fact, he's been on one for three years. Except he's been going back and forth across the Canadian border like a yo-yo, making a lot of people look like shit."
"That's their problem," I said.
"You're not hearing me. The Feds believe Coll is…" She paused and I heard her shuffling papers around. "They say he's a nonpathological compulsive-obsessive with paranoid and antisocial tendencies."
"Antisocial tendencies? This is the kind of crap that comes out of Quantico. Don't buy into it."