"Get out of here," he said to the detectives.
A FEW MINUTES LATER the sheriff and I watched through the window as they got into their car.
"At least Pollock had the decency to get himself killed in Lafayette Parish," the sheriff said. "What's the status on Harpo Scruggs?"
"Helen said a chippy came to his room in a taxi. She's still in there."
"What's Alex Guidry's tie-in to this guy?"
"It has something to do with the Terrebonnes. Everything in St. Mary Parish does. That's where they're both from."
"Bring him in."
"What for?"
"Tell him he's cruel to animals. Tell him his golf game stinks. Tell him I'm just in a real pissed-off mood."
TUESDAY MORNING HELEN AND I drove down Main, then crossed the iron drawbridge close by the New Iberia Country Club.
"You don't think this will tip our surveillance on Harpo Scruggs?" she said.
"Not if we do it right."
"When those two brothers were executed out in the Basin? One of the shooters had on a department uniform. It could have come from Guidry."
"Maybe Guidry was in it," I said.
"Nope, he stays behind the lines. He makes the system work for him."
"You know him outside the job?" I asked.
"He arrested my maid out on a highway at night when he was a deputy in St. Mary Parish. She's never told anyone what he did to her."
Helen and I parked the cruiser in front of the country club and walked past the swimming pool, then under a spreading oak to a practice green where Alex Guidry was putting with a woman and another man. He wore light brown slacks and two-tone golf shoes and a maroon polo shirt; his mahogany tan and thick salt-and-pepper hair gave him the look of a man in the prime of his life. He registered our presence in the corner of his eye but never lost his concentration. He bent his knees slightly and tapped the ball with a plop into the cup.
"The sheriff has invited you to come down to the department," I said.
"No, thank you," he said.
"We need your help with a friend of yours. It won't take long," Helen said.
The red flag on the golf pin popped in the wind. Leaves drifted out of the pecan trees and live oaks along the fairway and scudded across the freshly mowed grass.
"I'll give it some thought and ring y'all later on it," he said, and started to reach down to retrieve his ball from the cup.
Helen put her hand on his shoulder.
"Not a time to be a wise-ass, sir," she said.
Guidry's golf companions looked away into the distance, their eyes fixed on the dazzling blue stretch of sky above the tree line.
Fifteen minutes later we sat down in a windowless interview room. In the back seat of the cruiser he had been silent, morose, his face dark with anger when he looked at us. I saw the sheriff at the end of the hall just before I closed the door to the room.
"Y'all got some damn nerve," Guidry said.
"Someone told us you're buds with an ex-Angola gun bull by the name of Harpo Scruggs," I said.
"I know him. So what?" he replied.
"You see him recently?" Helen asked. She wore slacks and sat with one haunch on the corner of the desk.
"No."
"Sure?" I said.
"He's the nephew of a lawman I worked with twenty years ago. We grew up in the same town."
"You didn't answer me," I said.
"I don't have to."
"The lawman you worked with was Harpo Delahoussey. Y'all put the squeeze on Cool Breeze Broussard over some moonshine whiskey. That's not all you did either," I said.
His eyes looked steadily into mine, heated, searching for the implied meaning in my words.
"Harpo Scruggs tried to kill a priest Friday morning," Helen said.
"Arrest him, then."
"How do you know we haven't?" I asked.
"I don't. It's none of my business. I was fired from my job, thanks to your friend Willie Broussard," he said.
"Everyone else told us Scruggs was dead. But you know he's alive. Why's that?" Helen said.
He leaned back in the chair and rubbed his mouth, saying something in disgust against his hand at the same time.
"Say that again," Helen said.
"I said you damn queer, you leave me alone," he replied.
I placed my hand on top of Helen's before she could rise from the table. "You were in the sack with Cool Breeze's wife. I think you contributed to her suicide and helped ruin her husband's life. Does it give you any sense of shame at all, sir?" I said.
"It's called changing your luck. You're notorious for it, so lose the attitude, fucko," Helen said.
"I tell you what, when you're dead from AIDS or some other disease you people pass around, I'm going to dig up your grave and piss in your mouth," he said to her.
Helen stood up and massaged the back of her neck. "Dave, would you leave me and Mr. Guidry alone a minute?" she said.
BUT WHATEVER SHE DID or said after I left the room, it didn't work. Guidry walked past the dispatcher, used the phone to call a friend for a ride, and calmly sipped from a can of Coca-Cola until a yellow Cadillac with tinted windows pulled to the curb in front.
Helen and I watched him get in on the passenger side, roll down the window, and toss the empty can on our lawn.
"What bwana say now?" Helen said.
"Time to use local resources."
THAT EVENING CLETE PICKED me up in his convertible in front of the house and we headed up the road toward St. Martinville.
"You call Swede Boxleiter a 'local resource'?" he said.
"Why not?"
"That's like calling shit a bathroom ornament."
"You want to go or not?"
"The guy's got electrodes in his temples. Even Holtzner walks around him. Are you listening?"
"You think he did the number on this accountant, Anthony Pollock?"
He thought about it. The wind blew a crooked part in his sandy hair.
"Could he do it? In a blink. Did he have motive? You got me, 'cause I don't know what these dudes are up to," he said. "Megan told me something about Cisco having a fine career ahead of him, then taking money from some guys in the Orient."
"Have you seen her?"
He turned his face toward me. It was flat and red in the sun's last light, his green eyes as bold as a slap. He looked at the road again.
"We're friends. I mean, she's got her own life. We're different kinds of people, you know. I'm cool about it." He inserted a Lucky Strike in his mouth.
"Clete, I'm-"
He pulled the cigarette off his lip without lighting it and threw it into the wind.
"What'd the Dodgers do last night?" he said.
WE PULLED INTO THE driveway of the cinder-block triplex where Swede Boxleiter lived and found him in back, stripped to the waist, shooting marbles with a slingshot at the squirrels in a pecan tree.
He pointed his finger at me.
"I got a bone to pick with you," he said.
"Oh?"
"Two Lafayette homicide roaches just left here. They said you told them to question me."
"Really?" I said.
"They threw me up against the car in front of my landlord. One guy kicked me in both ankles. He put his hand in my crotch with little kids watching."
"Dave was trying to clear you as a suspect. These guys probably got the wrong signal, Swede," Clete said.
He pulled back the leather pouch on the slingshot, nests of veins popping in his neck, and fired a scarlet marble into the pecan limbs.
"I want to run a historical situation by you. Then you tell me what's wrong with the story," I said.
"What's the game?" he asked.
"No game. You're con-wise. You see stuff other people don't. This is just for fun, okay?"
He held the handle of the slingshot and whipped the leather pouch and lengths of rubber tubing in a circle, watching them gain speed.
"A plantation owner is in the sack with one of his slave women. He goes off to the Civil War, comes back home, finds his place trashed by the Yankees, and all his slaves set free. There's not enough food for everybody, so he tells the slave woman she has to leave. You with me?"