“This guy’s my confidential informant. That makes my lawyer his counsel. That means right of presence extends to me.”
Axel laughed. “Where’d you get that?”
“The guy’s trying to go straight,” Clete said. “Give him a break.”
“He stole this car,” Axel said. “Check the ignition.”
“I got the pink slip,” Travis said over his shoulder. “I lost the key.”
“I’ll take him home,” Clete said.
“You’re interfering with an officer in the performance of his duty,” Axel said.
“You were the guard who stuck a sock down an inmate’s throat?”
“No, this is what I did,” Axel said. “Because he doesn’t know when to leave the wrong broad alone.” He inserted a short wood club between Travis’s legs and wedged it into his colon. Travis clenched his buttocks, the blood draining from his face. “Got the message?” Axel said.
“Yeah!” Travis said, his knees shaking.
Axel pulled the club loose. “That’s better. We’re getting there.”
“You’re on a pad for a pimp?” Clete said to Axel.
“We’re telling you this guy is driving drunk and probably driving a stolen car,” the other man said. His hair was scalped on the sides. There was a circle of whiskers around his mouth. “We’ll put him on a D-ring and have his car towed, then buy you a drink. How about it?”
“Who’s the pimp y’all in with?” Clete said.
Axel turned around and rested the point of his club on Clete’s sternum. “You’re way over the line, lard-ass.” He moved the club up Clete’s chest to his throat and chin. “You copy?”
Clete’s right hand opened and closed in the darkness. He gazed at the rain rings on the bayou, the wobbling reflection of a house trailer on its surface. The wind changed, and he smelled an odor like mushrooms on a grave, like a disturbed bog deep in a swamp, the water swelling over his shoes and ankles. Someone pushed open the front door of the nightclub. Clete heard the woman on the stage singing a tale about the House of the Rising Sun.
“Take the baton out of my face, please,” he said.
“No problem,” Axel said. “We cool?”
“No.”
“You’re Robicheaux’s cornhole buddy, aren’t you.”
“We both worked homicide at NOPD. Before that we walked a beat on Canal and in the Quarter.”
“He’s muffing his new partner?”
“Didn’t quite hear that,” Clete said.
“Tell him not to let his mustache get in the way. Or maybe he wants to smell it all day.”
Clete stepped backward, blood thudding in his wrists. He gazed at the bayou; wind wrinkled the surface. “I’m going to walk back inside.”
“I say something wrong?” Axel said. “We’re all ears.”
“I’ll follow y’all to the booking room,” Clete said. “My friend Travis better not have any alterations on him.”
“I heard you took juice when you worked vice,” Axel said. “You also chugged pud for the Mob in Vegas.”
“You probably heard right,” Clete said.
“You’re the great Clete Purcel, huh?” Axel said. “I’d better watch out for you.”
He and his partner cuffed Travis and put him into an unmarked car, hitting his head as they pushed him in the back seat. The rain was falling harder now, ticking on Clete’s porkpie hat. He thought he heard an electrical short buzzing inside his head. He watched the three men drive away, his viscera turning to water.
He went back inside and sat at the bar. He blotted the rain off his face with his sleeve. “Give the singer whatever she’s having. Same with the lady down the bar.”
“What happened out there?” the bartender said.
“Nothing. Who’s running the action?”
“What action?”
Clete nodded toward the end of the bar.
“Ain’t nobody running it. It runs itself. Don’t get your necktie in it, man. You’ll have your face in the garbage grinder.”
Chapter Seven
Clete didn’t tell me about it until Monday, in my office.
“Did Travis file charges?” I said.
“For what?” he said.
“Axel Devereaux putting a baton up his colon.”
“A guy with a sheet like his thinks he’s going to get justice?” he said.
“I need to tell Helen about this.”
“I just saw Axel Devereaux outside. He looked right through me.”
“Get away from these guys, Clete.”
“It wasn’t me who started it.”
He had a point. Cops like Devereaux were part of the system. We created and nurtured and protected them, always to our detriment and never learning from the experience. “Where’s Travis?”
“I went his bail.”
“So you think we’ve got a deputy who’s a part-time pimp?”
“Who knows? We got black kids selling dope in front of their houses at three-thirty in the afternoon.”
“What’s the name of the hooker?”
“I never asked. I bought her a few drinks.”
He was wearing a loose suit and a crisp sport shirt without a tie. His eyes were smoky green, impossible to read, his face free of alcohol.
“I know what you’re thinking,” I said. “Clean those thoughts out of your head.”
“Which thoughts?”
“Squaring things with Devereaux on your own.”
“I shouldn’t have told you what Devereaux said about Bailey Ribbons,” he said.
“I’ll take care of that through the proper procedure.”
“Proper procedure? Lovely. Do you know what my greatest fear is?”
“No clue,” I said.
“That one day you’ll find out who you really are and shoot yourself.”
After work I drove in my pickup to the blues club on the bayou. The sun was low and red in the west; dust drifted from the cane fields. I went inside and opened my badge holder on the bartender.
“I know who you are,” he said.
“Clete Purcel was in here Friday night,” I said. “There was a black woman sitting at the end of the bar. She had on a navy blue coat with big brass buttons. She followed him into the restroom.”
The bartender popped a counter rag idly in the air, looking down the bar at an empty stool. “Yeah, I remember. What about her?”
“What’s her name?”
“Hilary Bienville. She drinks in here. But that’s all she does.”
“How many nights a week does she come in?”
“Four or five.”
“Who does she come in with?”
“I didn’t notice.”
“Who does she leave with?”
“Same answer.”
“Where does she live?”
“Don’t know exactly.”
“You know who Axel Devereaux is?”
“No, suh.”
The bartender began rinsing out a washrag in the sink, his eyes lidded. A black woman with a slim figure in a tight black skirt and a green cowboy shirt with pearl snap buttons and glass Mardi Gras beads in her hair was tuning her guitar on the stage. Her hair hung in her face, but I had the feeling her gaze was on me rather than the tuning pegs.
“Axel Devereaux is a dirty cop,” I said to the bartender. “Why carry his weight?”
“Way it is, suh.”
“Lose the Stepin Fetchit routine.”
He leaned toward me, his head round and slick and small for his big shoulders. “I ain’t got to take this.”
“You’re right.” I placed my business card in front of him. “I’ll tell Devereaux you’re a stand-up guy. I see you’ve got a mop and pail back there. That might make a great coat of arms.”
I went outside and got into my truck. But I didn’t leave. The light began to go out of the sky, and birds were gathering inside the oaks along the bayou, the tree frogs singing. Fifteen minutes passed. Then the front door opened and the woman in the cowboy shirt and Mardi Gras beads came out and popped a paper match and lit a cigarette in a holder and flipped the match away. She came to my window, smoke sliding from her lips. “What’s goin’ on, darlin’?”