My calico cat gave birth to her litter in the barn, but Mack found them before I did. He put them in a paper sack and weighted the sack with a rock and sank it in the coulee, pushing me away with his palm, then raising a cautionary finger at my face.
"Don't touch me again, no, 'cause I'm gonna hit you," he said. "Them kittens gonna grow up and kill the chicks, just like their mama been doin'. You gonna buy more chickens, you? You gonna put food on the table, you?"
He and my mother drove away one summer's day in a rooster tail of dust to Morgan City, where Mack got her a job at a beer garden. I didn't see her again until many years later, when I was in high school and I went to a roadhouse on the Breaux Bridge Highway with some other boys. It was a ramshackle gambling and pickup place, where the patrons fought over whores with bottles and knives in the parking lot. She was dancing with a drunk by the jukebox, her stomach pressed into his loins. Her face was tilted up into his, as though she were intrigued by his words. Then she saw me looking at her from the bar, saw my hand lift from my side to wave at her, and she smiled back at me briefly, her eyes shiny and indolent with alcohol, a vague recognition swimming into her face and disappearing as quickly as it came.
I never saw her again.
Monday morning the sheriff called me into his office. He wore a striped, black suit with a purple-and-white-striped snap-button shirt and a hand-tooled belt and half-topped boots. The windowsill behind his head was lined with potted plants that glowed in the thinly slatted light through the blinds. He had run a dry-cleaning business before he was elected sheriff and was probably more Rotarian than lawman; but he had been in the First Marine Division at the Chosin Reservoir and no one questioned his level of integrity or courage or the dues he had paid and never spoke about (except, to my knowledge, on one occasion, when he'd had a coronary and thought he was dying and he told me of pink air-bursts high above the snow on the hills and Chinese bugles blowing in the darkness and winds that could swell fingers into purple balloons).
His stomach hung over his belt and his cheeks were often flushed from hypertension, but his erect posture, either sitting or standing, always gave him the appearance of a much greater level of health than he actually possessed.
"I just got off the phone with the East Baton Rouge sheriff's office," he said, looking down at a yellow legal pad by his elbow. "They say a couple of black lowlifes were thrown off a roof east of town last night."
"Oh?"
"One of them has a broken arm, the other a concussion. The only reason they're alive is they crashed through the top of an oak tree."
I nodded, as though unsure of his larger meaning.
"The two lowlifes say Clete Purcel is the guy who made them airborne. You know anything about this?" the sheriff said.
"Clete's methods are direct sometimes."
"What's most interesting is one of them took down the license number of your truck." The sheriff's eyes dropped to his legal pad. "Let's see, I jotted down a quote from the East Baton Rouge sheriff. 'Who told your homicide investigator he could come into my parish with an animal like Clete Purcel and do business with a baseball bat?' I didn't quite have an answer for him."
"You remember my mother?" I asked.
"Sure," he replied, his eyes shifting off mine, going empty now.
"A pimp named Zipper Clum was on that roof. He told me he saw my mother killed. Back in 1966 or '67. He wasn't sure of the year. It wasn't an important moment in his career."
The sheriff leaned back in his chair and lowered his eyes and rubbed the cleft in his chin with two fingers.
"I'd like to believe you trusted me enough to tell me that up front," he said.
"People like Zipper Clum lie a lot. He claims two cops drowned her in a mud puddle. They shot somebody and put a throw-down on the corpse. My mother saw it. At least that's what Clum says."
He tore the top page off his legal pad and crumpled it up slowly and dropped it in the wastebasket.
"You want some help on this?" he asked.
"I'm not sure."
"Ernest Hemingway said chasing the past is a bum way to live your life," the sheriff said.
"He also said he never took his own advice."
The sheriff rose from his swivel chair and began watering his plants with a hand-painted teakettle. I closed the door softly behind me.
I took A vacation day Friday and drove back to New Orleans and parked my truck on the edge of the Quarter and walked through Jackson Square and Pirates Alley, past the deep green, shaded garden behind St. Louis Cathedral, and down St. Ann to Clete Purcel's office.
The building was tan stucco and contained an arched foyer and flagstone courtyard planted with banana trees. An "Out to Lunch" sign hung in the downstairs window. I went through the foyer and up the stairs to the second floor, where Clete lived in a one-bedroom apartment with a balcony that gave onto the street. The ironwork on the balcony was overgrown with bougainvillea, and in the evening Clete put on a pair of blue, baggy, knee-length boxing trunks and pumped barbells out there under a potted palm like a friendly elephant.
"You really want to 'front this vice cop over Little Face Dautrieve?" he asked. He had unwrapped two fried-oyster po' boy sandwiches, and he set them on the table with two cardboard containers of dirty rice.
"No, I want to find out why she has this personal involvement with Letty Labiche."
He sat down at the table and hung a napkin like a bib from his shirt collar. He studied my face.
"Will you stop looking at me like that?" I said.
"I can hear your wheels turning, big mon. When you can't get it to go your way, you find the worst guy on the block and put your finger in his eye."
"I'm the one who does that?"
"Yeah, I think that's fair to say." He chewed a mouthful of oysters and bread and sliced tomatoes and lettuce, a suppressed smile at the corner of his mouth.
I started to speak, but Clete put down his sandwich and wiped his mouth and his eyes went flat. "Dave, this vice cop is a real prick. Besides, a lot of guys at NOPD still think we're the shit that wouldn't flush."
"So who cares if we rumple their threads?" I said.
He blew out his breath and slipped his seersucker coat over his shoulder holster and put on his porkpie hat and waited for me by the door.
We went down to First District Headquarters on North Rampart, not far from the Iberville Welfare Project, but the detective we were looking for, a man named Ritter, had gone to Mississippi to pick up a prisoner. Clete's face was dark, his neck red, when we came back outside.
"I thought you'd be relieved," I said.
He bit a hangnail off his thumb.
"You see the way those guys were looking at me in there? I don't get used to that," he replied.
"Blow 'em off."
"They were down on you because you were honest. They were down on me because they thought I was dirty. What a bunch."
We got in my truck. A drop of perspiration ran out of the lining of his hat into his eye. His skin looked hot and flushed, and I could smell his odor from inside his coat.
"You said Little Face was supposed to come across for both Ritter and a liaison guy. Who's the liaison guy?" I said.
"A political fuck named Jim Gable. He's an insider at City Hall. He was in uniform at NOPD before we came along."
"A City Hall insider is extorting sexual favors from a street hooker?"
"This guy's had his Johnson out for thirty years. You want to brace him?"
"You up for it?" I asked.
Clete thought about it. "He's on vacation, over at his home in Lafourche Parish." Clete pressed his palms together and twisted them back and forth, the calluses scraping audibly. "Yeah, I'm up for it," he said.
We drove out of the city, south, to Bayou Lafourche, then followed the state highway almost to Timbalier Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. We turned down a dirt road through farmland and clusters of paintless cabins and clearings in the sugarcane that were filled with tin-roofed sheds and farm equipment. It was late afternoon now, and the wind had kicked up and the cane was blowing in the fields. Clouds moved across the sun and I could smell rain and salt in the air and the odor of dead animals in the ditches. Off in the distance, silhouetted against the dull shimmer of the bay, was a three-story coffee-colored, purple-tiled house surrounded by palm trees.