“Noble what?”
“You got loose from death row in Texas. I thought you had some smarts.”
“Tell me who are you, and maybe something you say will make sense.”
“I’m a guy who already cut you slack you didn’t deserve. I was fishing by the trestle over the Mermentau River when you bailed off the freight car. I should have dimed you, but I didn’t, and I’ve been paying for it ever since.”
“You got the wrong room.”
Clete stuck the .25 semi-auto in the back of his belt and grabbed Tillinger by the T-shirt and swung him into the wall so hard the room shook. Tillinger fell to the floor. His expression looked like someone had crashed two cymbals on his ears.
“Next stop is the toilet bowl,” Clete said.
Tillinger pushed himself up on his arms. “Do your worst. Then put yourself on a diet. You got a serious weight as well as a thinking problem.”
“Why were you hitting on Hilary Bienville?”
“You a cop?”
“I used to be,” Clete said. “You been putting shit in Hilary’s head? It takes a special kind of white man to do that to a woman of color.”
“I was a friend of Lucinda Arceneaux. Lucinda told me how some colored women were being used by some bad cops. You know who Travis Lebeau was, right?”
“He was in the Aryan Brotherhood,” Clete said. “He got dragged to death.”
“I’ve been trying to find out who killed Lucinda. It’s got something to do with prostitution.”
“Who shoved the baton down the throat of Axel Devereaux?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care. Can I get up?”
“An SUV like yours was seen hauling freight down the road right after Devereaux shuffled off.”
“I was there. But he was already dead. You got a beef because I messed up your fishing?”
“Where’d you get the wheels?”
“Boosted them.”
“Why’d you go to Devereaux’s house? You already creeped it once.”
“I was going to beat it out of him.”
“Beat what out of him?”
“The name of a movie guy Devereaux was scared of. That’s what a couple of stagehands said. Devereaux even got slapped around by this guy. The guy threw him off the set.”
“Because Devereaux was pimping?”
“I don’t know. That’s what I was going to find out. Miss Lucinda was tight with all those people. You ever see The Thin Blue Line? It saved an innocent man’s life. That could be my story.”
“I’m going to give you five minutes to get dressed and get out of here,” Clete said. “Then your ass is grass.”
Tillinger got to his feet cautiously, wobbling, pressing one hand against the wall. “You know what I was down for?”
“Killing your family.”
“That doesn’t bother you?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“My guess is you’re innocent. But you’re still an asshole,” Clete said. “You’ve used up one minute.”
Chapter Fifteen
Clete was at my back screen early on Saturday, freshly showered, his hair wet-combed, his clothes pressed. But his ebullience and his attempt to blend with the coolness of the morning and the dew-drenched fragrance of the flower beds were a poor disguise for the guilt he always wore like a child would, at least when he thought he had wronged me, which he had never intentionally done.
Alafair was still asleep. I fixed biscuits and coffee and waited for Clete to get to whatever was bothering him. It took a while. Clete had a way of talking about every subject in the world until he casually mentioned a minor incident such as smashing an earth grader through the home of a mafioso on Lake Pontchartrain, blowing a greaseball with a fire hose into a urinal at the casino, or pouring sand into the fuel tank of a plane loaded with more greaseballs, all of whom ended up petroglyphs on a mountainside in western Montana.
“You let Hugo Tillinger slide because he saved the little girl?” I said.
“He’s not a killer.”
We were seated at the breakfast table. The window was open, the wind sweet through the screen, Snuggs and Mon Tee Coon sitting on Tripod’s hutch.
“You’re not going to say anything?” he asked.
“This conversation didn’t happen. We bury it right here. Got it?”
“You’re not upset?”
“I probably would have done the same thing. The guy got a bad deal in Texas.”
“You don’t think he could have done the baton job on Devereaux?”
“These murders are about money, Clete.”
“You lost me, big mon.”
“The tarot and the floating cross have private meaning to the killer, but the motivation is much larger. It’s not sex, it’s not power or control. That leaves money.”
“I think you’re taking too much for granted,” Clete said.
“The killer injected Arceneaux with a fatal dose of heroin. The others went out hard. Why would he make distinctions in the way he killed his victims? It’s because he’s created a grand scheme. Think about it. A serial killer wants to paint the walls and enjoy every minute of it. He’s driven by compulsion. Unless his motivation is misogynistic, his targets are random. Our guy has a plan. Tillinger is a simpleton who wants to be a celebrity. He’s not our guy.”
Clete had a biscuit in his jaw. He looked at me for a long moment, then drank from his cup, his eyes not leaving mine. “Why only in our area?”
“That’s the big one,” I said. “He’s sending us a message.”
“Lucky us,” Clete said.
My speculations probably seemed grandiose. In reality, I wasn’t talking about our local homicides. I believed then, and I believe now, that our poor suffering state is part of a historical ebb tide that few recognize as such. Southern Louisiana, as late as the Great Depression, retained many of the characteristics of the antediluvian world, untouched by the Industrial Age. Our coast was defined by its pristine wetlands. They were emerald green and dotted with hummocks and flooded tupelo gums and cypress trees and serpentine rivers and bayous that turned yellow after the spring rains and lakes that were both clear and black because of the fine silt at the bottom, all of it blanketed with snowy egrets and blue herons and seagulls and brown pelicans.
We had little money but didn’t think of ourselves as poor. Our vision, if I can call it that, was not materialistic. If we had a concept about ourselves, it was egalitarian, although we would not have known what that word meant. We spoke French entirely. There was a bond between Cajuns and people of color. Cajuns didn’t travel, because they believed they lived in the best place on earth. But somehow the worst in us, or outside of us, asserted itself and prevailed and replaced everything that was good in our lives. We traded away our language, our customs, our stands of cypress, our sugarcane acreage, our identity, and our pride. Outsiders ridiculed us and thought us stupid; teachers forbade our children to speak French on the school grounds. Our barrier islands were dredged to extinction. Our coastline was cut with eight thousand miles of industrial channels, destroying the root systems of the sawgrass and the swamps. The bottom of the state continues to wash away in the flume of the Mississippi at a rate of sixteen square miles a year.
Much of this we did to ourselves in the same way that a drunk like me will destroy a gift, one that is irreplaceable and extended by a divine hand. Our roadsides are littered with trash, our rain ditches layered with it, our waterways dumping grounds for automobile tires and couches and building material. While we trivialize the implications of our drive-through daiquiri windows and the seediness of our politicians and recite our self-congratulatory mantra, laissez les bons temps rouler, the southern rim of the state hovers on the edge of oblivion, a diminishing, heartbreaking strip of green lace that eventually will be available only in photographs.