Clete looked at me, clearly trying not to laugh.
“Did you know a woman named Lucinda Arceneaux?” I asked.
“The name is not familiar.” Cato pulled his bobber and small lead weight and baited hook from the water and swung them to a different spot.
“She was murdered, Mr. Cato.”
“I call other people mister, but I don’t ax the same of them. Know why that is?”
“Afraid not,” I said.
“Because people who need titles need somebody else to tell them they’re worth something. No judgment intended.”
“You hear anything about Arab investments around here?” I said.
“I have to confess I haven’t seen no A-rabs of recent. You’re talking about people who ride camels?”
“That doesn’t really answer the question,” I said.
He looked at his watch. It was gold, the size of a half dollar, inlaid with jewels. “Can I get you gentlemen coffee or a drink before my lady friend comes? It’s fixing to rain. That means the goggle-eye perch gonna be biting soon.”
“Thanks for your time, Cato,” I said.
“Yes, suh. It was very nice of youse to come by.”
I walked back on the plank with Clete, then paused under the tree. “Wait here a minute, will you?”
“Whatever he knows, he’s keeping it to himself. Let it go,” Clete said.
“Be right back.”
I crossed back onto the houseboat. Cato was sitting in a folding canvas chair. The sky had darkened, and I could hear thunder in the distance and feel the barometer dropping and smell the fish bunching up under the lily pads. A big gar rolled as smoothly as a serpent by a flooded canebrake.
“I need to share something with you,” I said. “Up the bayou, under a big oak like that one on the shore, I caught my first fish when I was seven years old.”
I paused. Cato gazed at the lightning striking silently in a sky that was like purple velvet. The air was damp and sweet and heavy with the smell of sugarcane and the bayou at high tide.
“This is a special place,” I said. “Guys like us remember the way it used to be. But a lot of bad guys got their hands on us, Cato.”
“I know what you mean, suh.”
“Why’d you come back to South Louisiana?”
“I ain’t lost nothing in them other places.”
“Desmond is tight with the casino guys?”
“They go back. Desmond grew up on the Chitimacha Reservation.”
“Is somebody making a big move?”
“It’s about money from overseas. Laundering, that kind of t’ing. Politicians are mixed up in it. It’s stuff I don’t want to know about.”
“Who are the players?”
He looked up at me. “You better not have no truck with them, Mr. Robicheaux.”
“Call me Dave. Why should I not have any truck with them?”
“I’m talking about hundreds of millions of dol’ars. You know what people will do for that kind of money? Not just here, anywhere. Them A-rabs didn’t invent greed and the mean t’ings people can do.”
He reeled in his line, his gaze fixed on the sky, and refused to speak again, even to say goodbye.
I’ve always believed the dead roam the earth for many years after we try to weigh them down with stones. I also believe they outnumber us. For that reason I’ve never quarreled with the notion that they enter and try to shape our lives in order to redeem their own. So I was not surprised by the vision I had when I looked out my bedroom at three a.m. the day after my visit with Cato Carmouche.
The clouds of fog on the bayou were as white as cotton, bumping along the ground between the trees, a tug working its way toward the drawbridge, running lights on, glistening with mist. The figure was no more than five-four; he looked made of sourdough. The roundness of his face and limbs and stomach and soft buttocks seemed sketched by an artist. His mouth was a slice of watermelon, his hair as wispy as corn silk.
I wanted to believe I was watching an apparition, a wandering soul trying to unshackle the fetters of the grave and reclaim the coolness and oxygenated vibrancy of the air that the quick take for granted. I knew better, though. I had seen the figure before. I put my hand under my mattress and retrieved the army-issue 1911-model .45 automatic I had bought for twenty-five dollars in Saigon’s Bring Cash Alley. I slipped on my khakis and loafers and went through the kitchen into the mudroom. The sky was clear above the fog bank, the tops of the trees lit by the moon. I stepped into the yard. The figure moved behind an oak that was three feet across.
“Is that you, Smiley?” I asked.
There was no reply.
“You gave me quite a start,” I said. “I hope one of us is dreaming.”
The wind gusted through the trees, giving second life to the raindrops on the leaves, filling the air with the tannic smell of autumn and gas and nightshade in a forest that seldom saw sunlight.
“I hope you’re not mad at me,” I said. “It was never personal.”
“Please don’t come any nearer to me, Mr. Robicheaux,” the figure said. His voice had a lisp, a discomfiting wet one, like that of an oversize child nursing.
“I know it’s you, partner,” I said. “Tell me what you’re doing here. It’ll make us both feel better.”
“You made me do things I didn’t want to,” he said.
“You killed a female detective. A good woman who didn’t deserve to die.”
“That is not true. People were shooting at me. I did not ever aim in the woman’s direction. Do not make up stories.”
“She died just the same. Do you want me to call you Chester or Smiley?”
“My friends call me Smiley. But if you’re not my friend, call me something else.”
“You need to leave the area,” I said. “Then all this will be just a dream.”
“I’ll leave when my work is done.”
“What is your work?”
“You don’t know?”
“You get even for people who can’t defend themselves,” I said. “That’s a noble mission, Smiley. But you need to move on. Maybe back to Florida. Work on your tan.”
“Are you making fun of me?”
“I know better.”
I was sweating inside my clothes. Smiley’s real name was Chester Wimple. He had no category. Not even a partial one. In a harsh light his body seemed to take on the translucence and flaccidity of a jellyfish. He sounded like Elmer Fudd and ate Ding Dongs for breakfast and Eskimo Pies and Buster Bars around the clock. He had done hits with an ice pick on a New York subway and in the box seats of a racetrack and at a chamber of commerce meeting in New Jersey. He had never spent one day in jail.
I heard his feet move in the leaves. I held up my weapon so it silhouetted in the moonlight. I released the magazine and stuck it into my pocket, then ejected the chambered round, letting it fall on the grass. “I’m no threat to you, Smiley. I’m suspended from the sheriff’s department. I’m going to walk toward you now. Is that okay?”
The wind died. The leaves on the trees were as still as stamped metal. I walked toward the place where Smiley had been standing; the fog enveloped the lower half of my body. I saw a pirogue glide away from the bank, a solitary man seated and stroking evenly in the stern. He waved goodbye without turning around, as though he knew I would follow him to the water’s edge but offer no more protest about his presence in Acadiana.
I could hear myself breathing in the dark.
Chapter Nineteen
The sun came up like thunder, a yellowish bloodred in the smoke of a runaway stubble fire. I did not tell Alafair or Clete about my encounter with Smiley, in part because they would think me unhinged. Also I did not trust my own perceptions. For good or bad, my preoccupation with death and the past had defined much of my life, and a long time ago I had made my separate peace with the world and abandoned any claim on reason or normalcy or the golden mean. Waylon Jennings said it many years ago: I’ve always been crazy but it’s kept me from going insane.