“She’s a drunk and a whore,” he said. “I was good to her when nobody else was. She slept with everything that wore pants. I caught her a bunch of times, but I never hit her.”
“We’re talking about Corina Cormier, right?” I said.
“Who’s it sound like?”
“Where can we find her?”
“I wouldn’t know.” He was looking at Bailey now. “If she’s alive, she’s probably a hag. The man that slept with her had to tie a board across his ass so he didn’t fall in, and that was forty years back.”
“You need to dial down the language, Mr. Patout,” I said.
“Don’t you lecture me, boy,” he said. “In fact, it’s time for you to git. I got work to do.”
“Git?” I said.
“This is St. Landry Parish. You got no authority here. Come back with a warrant or stay the hell away from me. That means you drag your sorry asses out of here.”
There are times you hold your ground, and there are times you walk away. In this instance we were off our turf. There was another factor involved. Patout was not the kind you took down easily. He was the kind you sometimes ended up killing.
His hands still hung at his sides, curled like an ape’s, the nails half-mooned with dirt and grease. “Why you staring at me?”
I could feel my old enemy flickering to life like a flame working its way up a cornstalk in late summer. “See you down the road,” I said.
I winked at him. It was a poor mask for our defeat at the hands of an ignorant and obviously violent man. We got back into the cruiser and drove away.
“See you down the road?” Bailey said.
I didn’t reply. One mile down the road, she said, “Turn around.”
“What for?” I replied.
“Either you turn around or I’ll get out and walk.”
“Bad idea.”
“Then stop the car.”
The flasher was already on. I U-turned in the middle of the two-lane and drove back to Patout’s wrecker service. Bailey and I got out at the same time. Patout was inside the shop, under a truck hood. He lifted his head. “What now?”
“You see this?” Bailey said.
“Your badge?” he said.
“It’s not just a badge. It’s a symbol of honor and integrity. You will respect it. You will not use profanity in speaking to an officer of the law, and you will not tell him or her what you will and will not do. And you will never again disrespect anyone from our parish who carries this badge. That starts with calling an adult ‘boy.’ ”
His eyes shifted on mine. “She for real?”
“Why don’t you man up and apologize?” I said.
“All right,” he said.
“All right, what?” I said.
“I apologize. You come at me hard. I ain’t up to it. I got a bad heart and a bad temper. Don’t pay me no mind. How’s Desmond doing?”
“Go ask him,” Bailey said.
“I doubt he’d want that.”
“Give it a try,” Bailey said.
“I’ve thought about it,” he said. He stared at the concrete floor, his eyes empty, his emotions, whatever they were, as dead as wet ash. “What’s done is done. There ain’t no changing it. He was a good little boy. I always miss that little boy. Cain’t get him out of my head sometimes.”
After lunch I talked to Helen in her office.
“So Hugo Tillinger is running around naked without his truck, and Smiley could be anywhere, and y’all’s interview with Desmond Cormier’s father was a dead end?”
“I don’t see it that way,” I said. “Tillinger is a smart guy. If he’s digging around in Desmond’s family, it’s for a reason.”
Helen was standing by the window. “Come here.”
I walked behind her desk and stood next to her.
“Look across the bayou,” she said. “Those people picnicking under the shelters and children flying kites on the baseball diamond have no idea what the world is really like. Can you imagine showing any of them a photograph of Axel Devereaux with the baton shoved down his throat? Or Hilary Bienville torn apart? Or what some of Smiley’s victims looked like?”
“You’re preaching to the choir,” I said.
“You’re not hearing me. I’m saying a black flag has its purpose.”
“It’s not a good one, either,” I said.
“This from you? Stop it.”
“It’s a mistake to create a mystique about these murders,” I said.
“They’re just regular meat and potatoes?”
“I’m saying they’re about money.”
“That’s what you want to believe. You know better.”
I looked at my watch. “I’d better get on it. Anything else?”
“You and Bailey getting along?”
“Why wouldn’t we?”
“You deserve a good life, bwana.”
“Could you translate that for me?”
Her gaze dropped to my chest and arms. I was wearing a white dress shirt and a tie.
“You have too much starch in your shirts,” she said. “You ought to switch your laundry service. Loosen up. Go with the flow.”
“Adios,” I said.
Helen was being invasive about my sex life in part because hers was so outrageous, but I was glad she had changed the subject from a discussion that no cop likes. Here’s the truth about the profession I have served most of my adult life: There are uncomfortable moments for almost all cops. The struggles are similar to those of the mystic with doubt about God’s existence; the lover who looks into the eyes of a companion after orgasm and sees only disinterest and an uncoupling of the spirit; or the humanist who watches a neighbor whip a child savagely in the yard. If a cop is on the job long enough, he will see things he never discusses with anyone, not unless he is afflicted with the same psychological disorders that define the sociopaths he locks up. The moment I’m describing, the one that happens in the middle of the night, when the booze and weed and pills aren’t working anymore, is the realization that real evil is not simply a product of environmental factors. It may be a disembodied presence floating from place to place, seeking to drop its tentacles into whatever host it can find.
What are its origins? I don’t know. Charles Manson and his kind are harlequins and poseurs. Anyone who wants to check out the collective nature of evil can take a photo tour of Hitler’s extermination camps and decide whether William Blake’s tiger is out there or not.
Later that same day, Smiley Wimple was sitting in a Morgan City Laundromat, reading a Wonder Woman comic, when two men came in the front door. He had not seen them before, but he knew their kind. Their tight suits had a liquid shine; they wore hairstyles and sideburns that were thirty years out of fashion; they stank of pomade and deodorant and made Smiley think of walking chemical factories. They always had cigarettes either in their mouths or cupped in their hands, as though they were fire dragons, the inventors of flame, a fiery force that caused people to melt like wax from their heat. Their eyes ate up the scenery and the people in it. Their meters were always running, tick-tick, tick-tick, tick-tick.
The two men walked straight to Smiley’s chair. He was wearing a safari hat and Ray-Bans. He peered over the top of the comic like a smiling angel-food cake. “Hi, hi,” he said.
“Come with us,” one of the men said. His black mustache had gray hair and tiny pieces of food in it.
“I was taught not to talk to strangers, even though they might be nice.”
“That’s us. Nice,” the same man said. When he grinned, the skin around his mouth looked shriveled, like it was rubber or it wouldn’t work right.
“My friends call me Smiley, although my real name is Chester.”
“Yeah, we know that,” the same man said. “My name is Jerry Gee. You don’t remember us from Miami?”