The note read:
My dearest Chester,
You have been a good boy. Don’t ever let anyone say you are not. But I have the feeling you have been spying on me. You mustn’t do this. We cannot be together again until our work is over. Please don’t be offended. You know how much I love and care for you. You are the light of my life. Had we not had each other, we would not have survived.
We’ll be together soon. Just keep being the sweet boy you are and stop these evil people from preying on our friends and children who cannot defend themselves.
She had not signed the note or even used an initial. He wanted to cry. Not out of joy, either. She did not want to see him.
He pushed the point of the commando knife into the skin behind his chin, forcing his head back until his neck ached. What if he shoved the blade to the hilt? Would it reach the brain? What was the poem she used to read to him? He could remember only pieces. Tiger! tiger! burning bright. In the forests of the night... What the hammer? What the chain? In what furnace was thy brain?
He had thought she was talking about him and why he was different from other children.
“Oh, no, no,” she said. “You’re a good boy, Chester. This poem is about bad people, the kind who have hurt us.”
At that moment, he knew no power on earth would ever separate them.
He replaced the rubber band around the index cards and flipped through the images with his thumb. Two more targets, people he knew nothing about. What had they done? Actually, he didn’t care. If they were on the cards, there was good reason. They knew it, too. He saw the regret in their eyes before he sent them to that place where they couldn’t hurt people anymore, and he felt no guilt about their passing. He gave ice cream to children with a glad heart. That’s who Chester Wimple was.
But something else was bothering him. He was losing his objectivity, and his motivations were becoming impure. For personal reasons, he wanted to do the man with the convex face and the peroxided shoe-brush haircut and the muscles that glistened with suntan oil. The man in the pool with Emmeline Nightingale, the man whose body fluids floated in the water and touched hers. He wanted to do this man on his own, up close with the commando knife, or with a rifle from afar so the soft-nosed, jacketed round would be toppling when it keyholed through the face, all of it caught inside the cylindrical simplicity of the telescopic sight.
Chester turned on the television set and stared at cartoons for the next two hours, sitting on the side of the bed, his mouth open, his face as insentient as a bowl of porridge.
Clete was not only a member of our family, he would lay down his life for Alafair or me. Which also meant he inserted himself into situations without consulting anyone. On Tuesday, he and Homer went fishing in St. Mary Parish, then drove top-down to the movie set behind Albania Plantation. Levon and Rowena Broussard were standing behind a camera down the bayou. The actors and the crew were just breaking for lunch. Tony Nine Ball was nowhere in sight. Clete removed his porkpie hat. “My name is Clete Purcel, Mr. Broussard. Got a minute?”
“You don’t have to tell me who you are,” Levon said.
Clete put his hat back on and looked at the bayou and the hundreds of robins in the trees. “This is my pal Homer.”
“Homer Penny?” Levon said.
Homer looked at his feet.
“I’m his guardian,” Clete said. “Unofficial but guardian just the same. He’s never seen a movie set.”
Clete could hear the wind in the silence.
“How are you, Homer?” Rowena said, and extended her hand. The scars where she’d cut herself were red and as thick as night crawlers.
“Dave and Alafair Robicheaux don’t know I’m here,” Clete said.
“You’re on a mission of mercy?” Levon said.
“I was an extra and did security on a couple of films but didn’t have my name on the credits. I didn’t think you’d mind. I mean us being here and all.”
“Welcome,” Levon said.
“I wanted to ask a favor, too.”
“I never would have guessed,” Levon said.
“I have a Frisbee over there on the table, Homer,” Rowena said. “Why don’t you and I toss a couple?”
Homer looked down the slope at a row of cannons and actors in kepis and butternut uniforms. “That’d be great,” he said.
Levon waited until they were out of earshot. “You’re here about Alafair?”
“She worked hard on the script,” Clete said. “It wasn’t for the money, either.”
“What do you want me to do about it?”
“Tell her you want her back.”
“She can come back any time she likes.”
“That’s not the same as apologizing for what happened and telling her you appreciate her work.”
Levon took out his cell phone and found a number in his contacts. His call to Alafair went straight to voicemail. “This is Levon. Tony is a jerk. I need you here, Alafair. Your script is beautiful. I don’t want amateurs messing it up. I sent you two e-mails. Call me.” He closed his cell. “Anything else?”
“I sent the Nightingale chauffeur to you. A guy named Swede Jensen. I hope you didn’t mind.”
“He’s a Confederate soldier. He’s down by the bayou now.”
“No kidding?” Clete said.
“I’d like to eat lunch and get back to work.”
“Sure,” Clete said.
“Do you and Homer want to join us?”
Clete saw a red Frisbee sail over the cannon and Homer jump in the air to catch it, his face split with a smile. “That’d be nice.”
That night the rain came again, mixed with hail and bursts of tree-lashing wind. Clete ordered in a pizza, and he and Homer watched My Darling Clementine on Clete’s television set. At the end of the film, when Henry Fonda leaves the woman by the side of the road and rides away into the Arizona wastelands, Homer’s eyes turned wet, and he looked at Clete for an explanation, either for the film or for his emotions.
“See, it’s about the fact that a guy like Wyatt Earp wouldn’t ever be able to enjoy a normal life,” Clete said.
“Clementine is so beautiful,” Homer said. “You can see the love in her eyes. It’s not right to leave her just standing by the road.”
“See, John Ford directed that film, Homer. He was always experimenting with light and shadow. The story is about good and evil. Even though all the Clantons are killed, Wyatt knows more of them are waiting out there in the wastelands. He’s the guy who has to keep the rest of us safe.”
“So maybe he’ll come back and see Clementine again?”
“You never can tell.”
Later, as Clete lay in the dark with the rain clattering on the roof, his own words brought him to conclusions about himself that he didn’t want to face. He had two kinds of dreams, one in color, one in black and white. Sometimes in his sleep, he returned to the French Quarter of the old days, when Sam Butera and Louis Prima were blowing out the walls at Sharkey Bonano’s Dream Room on Bourbon, the balconies dripping with flowers along streets that seemed about to collapse in on themselves, the street bands playing for coins and the sidewalk artists setting up their easels in Jackson Square, the black kids dancing with taps as big as horseshoes clamped on their feet, the smell of beignets and café au lait in the Café du Monde, the palms and banana fronds ticking inside the gated courtyards, the arched entranceways dank and cool-smelling, the stone stained with lichen and ponded with water that resembled spilled burgundy in the shadows.