“You couldn’t make the trace?” he said.
“The signal was probably relayed off two or three towers,” I said.
“You checked out the story about the artist in the wall?”
“His name was Pierre Louviere. Evidently, he was an eccentric guy who hung out with a weird crowd in the Quarter.”
“How’d he go out?”
“Not easy.”
“You think Smiley did Penny?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“He would have said so. He doesn’t have any guilt about the people he kills.”
“Psychopaths lie for the sake of lying,” Clete said.
“He was obviously bothered about putting a bomb in a car that would kill a child.”
The waitress put our food on the table. She looked uncomfortable, obviously having overheard our conversation.
“Don’t pay attention to us,” I said.
She tried to smile but had a hard time with it. She walked away, blinking.
“Go on,” Clete said to me.
“I think Smiley feels he got set up.”
“No idea who he’s working for?”
“None. Sherry Picard called.”
Clete looked at a place six inches from the side of my face. “Yeah?”
“She said y’all aren’t hanging out anymore.”
“It’s more like she flushed me. No big deal.”
Right. I avoided looking at his eyes. He put a cracker into his mouth and chewed. He hadn’t touched his sandwich.
“She’s off the wall, Clete.”
“I’m old, she’s young. You warned me. End of subject.”
“Age is not a factor. She has the grace of a chain saw.”
Wrong choice. Three things about Clete Purceclass="underline" Since I’d first met him, he’d never once used God’s name in vain; referred to a woman in a profane way; or criticized a woman who’d dumped him, unless you counted the postcard he sent me from El Sal when he skipped the country on a murder beef and asked me to tell his ex, who’d cheated on him, that he wanted her to have the toothbrush he’d left in the bathroom.
He wadded up a napkin and lobbed it into a trash can by the cold-drink dispenser. “Smiley say anything about Jimmy Nightingale?”
“No. But I had a strange experience with Jimmy at Baron’s Health Club.”
“Like what?”
“I was hitting the speed bag and pretty sweaty and dirty. He squeezed the back of my neck and whispered in my ear. He was standing on my foot.”
Clete’s gaze went away from mine, then came back. “He’s AC/DC?”
“He was talking about making the world into the Garden of Eden.”
“You’re making this up?”
“Jimmy isn’t the same guy I used to know,” I said. “But that’s not what bothers me. I couldn’t scrub his touch off my skin. Helen said the same thing about him.”
Clete looked into space. “I think I’m going back to the Big Sleazy for a few days. Start putting junk in my arm, hanging out at bottomless clubs, go to a Crisco party at a steam room, do something healthy for a change.”
“It’s not funny, Clete.”
“None of this is,” he replied. “I didn’t give you the whole gen on Sherry. She called one of her sniper targets a sand nigger. She tried to take it back, but it made me think about her relationship to Kevin Penny.”
“She might have decided to get rough?”
“Sherry wouldn’t make a good Maryknoll.”
Clete went to Walmart that afternoon. On the way out, he ran into Swede Jensen, the Nightingale chauffeur, whom he’d helped get a job as an extra in Levon’s film adaptation. Swede was wearing white Bermuda shorts with bananas on them and a sleeveless golf shirt, his tan as dark as saddle leather, his armpit hair stiff and bleached by the sun. His concave face always reminded Clete of a hominid replica he had seen in a natural history museum.
“What’s the haps, Swede?” Clete said.
Swede looked around but kept walking.
“Wait up,” Clete said.
“Oh, hey, what say, Purcel?” Swede replied, studying his watch. “How’s it hanging?”
“I saw you on the set behind Albania Plantation. You were wearing a Confederate uniform.”
“Yeah, it’s a lot of fun.”
“They paying you okay?”
“Yeah, union scale, all that stuff.”
Clete waited for Swede to thank him. It didn’t happen. “You don’t have a conflict with your chauffeur job?”
“The Nightingales are flexible. Sorry, I got to boogie.”
“Yeah, the sky’s about to fall. Look at me.”
“Like I said—” Swede began.
“No, you didn’t say anything. Your eyes are going everywhere except my face. In the meantime, you’re blowing me off. It’s called rude.”
“Thanks for what you did. I got a ton of things to do. Nice seeing you.”
Clete stepped in his way. “Don’t talk shit to me, Swede.”
Swede looked like an animal with a limb caught in a trap.
“Did you know fear smells like soiled cat litter?” Clete said.
Swede almost ran through the door.
That weekend, Southern Louisiana was sweltering, thunder cracking as loud as cannons in the night sky; at sunrise, the storm drains clogged with dead beetles that had shells as hard as pecans. It was the kind of weather we associated with hurricanes and tidal surges and winds that ripped tin roofs off houses and bounced them across sugarcane fields like crushed beer cans; it was the kind of weather that gave the lie to the sleepy Southern culture whose normalcy we so fiercely nursed and protected from generation to generation.
I could not sleep Sunday night, and on Monday I woke with a taste like pennies in my mouth and a sense that my life was unspooling before me, that the world in which I lived was a fabrication, that the charity abiding in the human breast was a collective self-delusion, and that the bestial elements we supposedly exorcised from civilized society were not only still with us but had come to define us, although we sanitized them as drones and offshore missiles marked “occupant” and land mines that killed children decades after they were set.
These are signs of clinical depression or maybe a realistic vision of the era in which we live. During moments like these, no matter the time of day or night, I had found release only in a saloon. The long bar and brass foot rail, the wood-bladed fans, the jars of cracklings and pickled eggs and sausages, the coldness of bottled beer or ice-sheathed mugs, the wink in the barmaid’s eye and the shine on the tops of her breasts, the tumblers of whiskey that glowed with an amber radiance that seemed almost ethereal, the spectral bartender without a last name, the ringing of the pinball machine, all these things became my cathedral, a home beneath the sea, and just as deadly.
Thoughts like these are probably a form of alcoholic insanity. But on that particular Monday morning, I preferred my own madness to what I had begun to feel, as Helen and Clete did — namely, that an inchoate sickness was in our midst, and it was as palpable in the hot wetness of the dawn as the smell of lions in the street at high noon.
At 9:33 A.M., I received another call from Sherry Picard.
“I need to talk to you or Clete,” she said. “Since he’s not in his office and not answering his cell phone, I called you.”
“Thanks,” I replied.
“I was warned about you two.”
“This is a business line,” I said. “If you have a personal issue, call me at home.”
“My ass. Did you try to dime me with the FBI?”
“That’s probably one of the craziest things I’ve heard in a while.”
“Because an agent just left my office. I have the distinct feeling that I’m being looked at for the Penny homicide.”
“Talk to the U.S. Justice Department,” I said. “The feds hate Clete’s guts. I don’t have contact with them. Most of them wouldn’t take the time to spit on us.”