"You're telling me Ritter's still in there?" I said.
"Yes and no." His mouth was cone-shaped when he breathed through it. "I had my hands full. Janet was getting hysterical and breaking things and throwing her clothes in a suitcase. Then I heard two popping sounds, like firecrackers in the rain. I went back to the car wash but there wasn't anybody around. Except Ritter floating face-down in all that soap and wax. He'd taken one in the ear and one through the mouth."
I got up from the table and looked out at my neighbor's field and at the fog rising out of the coulee, my back turned to Clete so he couldn't see my face.
When I turned around again Clete's eyes were jittering with light, his lips moving uncertainly, like a drunk coming off a bender when he doesn't know whether he should laugh or not at what he has done.
Then his eyes fixed on mine and his expression went flat and he said, as though by explanation, "This one went south on me."
"Yeah, I guess it did, Clete."
"That's all you're going to say?"
"Come inside. I'll fix you something to eat," I said as I walked past him toward the house.
"Streak?… Damn it, don't give me that look."
But I went through the kitchen into the bath and brushed my teeth and put cold water on my face and tried not to think the thoughts I was thinking or take my anger out on a friend who had put himself in harm's way on my account. But I believed Ritter'd had knowledge about my mother's death and now it was gone.
I dried my face and went back into the kitchen.
"You want me to boogie?" Clete said.
"Get the skillet out of the cabinet, then call Nig and Wee Willie and tell them you'll need a bond," I said as I took a carton of eggs and a slab of bacon from the icebox.
After we ate breakfast, Bootsie, Alafair, and I went to Mass. When we got back, Clete was down at the dock, sitting at a spool table under an umbrella, reading the newspaper. From a distance he looked like a relaxed and content man enjoying the fine day, but I knew better. Clete had no doubt about the gravity of his actions. Once again his recklessness had empowered his enemies and he now hung by a spider's thread over the maw of the system.
Television programs treat the legal process as an intelligent and orderly series of events that eventually punishes the guilty and exonerates the innocent. The reality is otherwise. The day you get involved with the law is the day you lose all control over your life. What is dismissed by the uninitiated as "a night in jail" means sitting for an indeterminable amount of time in a holding cell, with a drain hole in the floor, looking at hand-soiled walls scrawled with pictures of genitalia, listening to other inmates yell incoherently down the corridors while cops yell back and clang their batons on the bars.
You ask permission to use a toilet. When you run out of cigarettes or matches, you beg them off a screw through the bars. Your persona, your identity, and all the social courtesy you take for granted are removed from your existence like the skin being pulled off a banana. When you look through a window onto the street, you realize you do not register on the periphery of what are called free people. Your best hope of getting back outside lies with a bondsman who secretes Vitalis through his pores or a twenty-four-hour Yellow Pages lawyer who wears zircon rings on his fingers and keeps a breath mint on his tongue. We're only talking about day one.
That afternoon I finally got Dana Magelli on the phone.
"Clete says the entry wounds look like they came from a.22 or.25," I said.
"Thank him for his feedback on that."
"He didn't do it, Dana. It was a professional hit. I think we're talking about Johnny Remeta."
"Except Purcel has a way of stringing elephant shit behind him everywhere he goes."
"You want me to bring him in?"
"Take a guess."
"We'll be there in three hours."
There was a long silence and I knew Magelli's basic decency was having its way with him.
"IAD has been looking at Ritter for a month. Tell Purcel to come in and give a statement. Then get him out of town," he said.
"Pardon?"
"Janet Gish confirms his story. We don't need zoo creatures muddying up the water right now. You hearing me?"
"You're looking at some other cops?"
He ignored my question. "I mean it about Purcel. He's not just a pain in the ass. In my view he's one cut above the clientele in Angola. He mixes in our business again, I'll turn the key on him myself," Magelli said.
I replaced the receiver in the phone cradle on top of the counter in the bait shop. Through the screen window I could see Clete at a spool table, watching an outboard pass on the bayou, his face divided by sunlight and shadow. I walked outside the bait shop and looked down at him.
"That was Dana Magelli. You're going to skate," I said.
He beamed at me, and I realized all the lessons he should have learned had just blown away in the breeze.
The next day NOPD matched the.25-caliber rounds taken from Don Ritter's body to the.25-caliber round that was fired into Zipper Clum's forehead.
That night Alafair went with friends to the McDonald's on East Main. She came home later than we expected her and gave no explanation. I followed her into her bedroom. Tripod was outside the screen on the windowsill, but she had made no effort to let him in. The light was off in the room and Alafair’s face was covered with shadow.
"What happened tonight?" I asked.
"Whenever I tell you the truth about something, it makes you mad."
"I've shown bad judgment, Alafair. I'm just not a good learner sometimes."
"I saw Johnny. I took a ride with him."
I ran my hand along the side of my head. I could feel a tightening in my veins, as though I had a hat on. I took a breath before I spoke.
"With Remeta?" I said.
"Yes."
"He's wanted in another shooting. An execution at point-blank range in a car wash."
"I told him I couldn't see him again. I'm going to sleep now, Dave. I don't want to talk about Johnny anymore," she said.
She sat on the edge of her bed and waited for me to go out of the room. On the shelf above her bedstead I could see the painted ceramic vase Remeta had given to her, the Confederate soldier and his antebellum girlfriend glowing in the moonlight.
The call came at four in the morning.
"You told your daughter not to see me again?" the voice asked.
"Not in so many words," I replied.
"That was a chickenshit thing to do."
"You're too old for her, Johnny."
"People can't be friends because they're apart in years? Run your lies on somebody else."
"Your problems began long before we met. Don't take them out on us."
"What do you know about my problems?"
"I talked with the prison psychologist."
"I'm starting to construct a new image of you, Mr. Robicheaux. It's not a good one."
I didn't reply. The skin of my face felt flaccid and full of needles. Then, to change the subject, I said, "You should have lost the.25 you used on Zipper Clum. NOPD has made you for the Ritter hit."
"Ritter gave up your mother's killers, Mr. Robicheaux. I was gonna give you their names. Maybe even cap them for you. But you act like I'm the stink on shit. Now I say fuck you," he said, and hung up.
At 9 A.M. I sat in the sheriff's office and watched the sheriff core out the inside of his pipe with a penknife.
"So you got to see the other side of Johnny Remeta?" he said, and dropped the black buildup of ash off his knife blade into the wastebasket.
"He pumped Ritter for information, then blew out his light," I said.
"This guy is making us look like a collection of web-toed hicks, Dave. He comes and goes when he feels like it. He takes your daughter for rides. He murders a police officer and calls you up in the middle of the night and tells you about it. Forgive me for what I'm about to say next."