“Think so?”
Once again I had become his priest. “Yeah, over the gunnels with the doodah.” But I was bothered by Tillinger’s death, too. I thought he got a raw shake all the way around. I tried to change the subject. “Did you and Alafair have a good time at Red Lerille’s last night?”
“She didn’t tell you about the run-in with Tee Boy Ladrine?”
“The jail guard who got fired?”
“Yeah, Lou Wexler deliberately plows into him, then apologizes by pounding on his back until the guy can’t breathe.”
“Wexler has a beef with him or something?”
“Something about civil rights and how the inmates got treated in the jail. He got a little sensitive with me.”
“You?”
“So I tell him he’s quite a guy, and he starts talking about Desmond Cormier and Roncevaux and how much he loves and pities Cormier.”
“Alafair didn’t tell me any of this.”
“Wexler’s gay?”
“I don’t know. He seems attracted to Alafair.”
“What’s this stuff about Roncevaux?”
“It’s high up in the Pyrenees. A battle took place there in the eighth century. The Song of Roland is a celebration of it.”
“So what do medieval guys clanking around like bags of beer cans have to do with Hollywood?”
“It’s a little more complex than that.”
“Speak slowly and I’ll try to catch on. Use flash cards if you have to.”
“Clete, I was trying to—”
“Forget it,” he said.
“There are people who believe that the legends of King Arthur and the search for the Holy Grail and the horns blowing along the road to Roncevaux make it all worthwhile.”
“Make what worthwhile?”
“Being born. Dying. That kind of thing.”
Clete pointed a finger at me. “I don’t want to hear that again. I’ve got enough crazy people in my life already.”
Other diners were starting to look at us. Clete bent in to his food. Then he wiped his mouth and said, “This stuff is sick, Dave. The deaths of the women, the subhuman cruelty. I can’t sleep. It’s like coming back from Nam. It’s like I’ve got tiger shit in my brain.”
“We’ll catch whoever is responsible, Clete. It’s a matter of time.”
“What about Alafair?” he said.
“What about her?”
“Somebody was stalking us with a scoped rifle at Henderson Swamp. Maybe the same guy was at Sean McClain’s house. If he can’t clip one of us, maybe he’ll find another target, one whose loss you’ll never survive.”
“That’s not going to happen,” I said, my face flushing.
“You know the future?”
“Knock it off.”
“Our guy won’t stop until we tear up his ticket. I’m going to do it, Streak. I’m going to paint the landscape with that cocksucker.”
The tables around us had gone quiet. I stared at my plate, my ears ringing, wondering where Alafair was at the moment.
When I got back on the sidewalk, I called her on my cell. “Hey,” I said.
“Hey, yourself.”
“I’m just checking in on you, Baby Squanto.”
That was her nickname when she was little. She had a whole collection of Baby Squanto Indian books. “I’m at the set, down by Morgan City. We’re shooting some of the last scenes.”
“What time will you be home?”
“Probably by seven. What’s going on?”
“Nothing. Clete told me about Lou Wexler getting into it with the guy at Red’s.”
“Lou doesn’t like white men who knock women or minority people around.”
“A man who cares for a woman doesn’t get into a confrontation in front of her,” I said.
“Lou is a good person, Dave. How about laying off the people I work with? Just for one day.”
“I didn’t know I was that bad.”
“I’m going to give you a recorder for your birthday.”
“See you this evening.”
I closed my phone. Clete came out of the cafeteria and crossed the street and got into his Caddy in the alley, where it was parked. He drove away without waving. I wanted to believe he hadn’t seen me. I watched the taillights of the Caddy disappear in the traffic, headed west, toward Lafayette and I-10. I felt even older than my years but did not know why.
Clete drove for three hours to a brick church in the piney woods of East Texas. Behind it, headstones trailed like scattered teeth down a slope to a lake spiked with dead trees, the banks churned with the hoof prints of Angus that had the red scours. The foundation in the church was cracked, the broken panes in the stained glass replaced with cardboard. Clete parked his Caddy and got out. The trees in the distance were bright green, the light harsh. There was a rawness in the wind that chilled his bones.
The post-burial service, which Clete had indicated he would not attend, had just started. He knew none of the people there. They seemed to be simple people, out of yesteryear, with work-worn hands and faces, the kind of people who didn’t quarrel with their lot and accepted death as they would a shadow moving across a meadow, subsuming whatever was in its path. There was an innocence and shyness about them, like that of children, and he wanted to tell them that but didn’t know how.
The grave had been filled in, the humped dirt partly covered by a roll of artificial grass. A tall man in black, his hair hanging over his ears, read from the Book of Psalms. Then the service was over, and the mourners drifted off to a table loaded with food in the shade of the church. Clete’s head was cold, and he wished he had brought his hat. He caught up with the man in black. “Sir?”
The man kept walking. On the far side of the lake, Clete thought he saw a white boxlike truck pull into a grove of pine trees.
“Reverend?” Clete said.
The man in black turned around. His face was chiseled, shrunken in the coldness of the wind. One wing of his starched collar was bent up in a point, like a shark’s tooth. “People here’bouts call me Preacher.”
“My name is Clete Purcel. I’d like to ask you a question about Mr. Tillinger. I’m a private investigator. My question is rather direct and maybe offensive.”
“Go ahead and ask it.”
“Did Mr. Tillinger kill his wife and daughter?”
“No, I do not think that. Hugo would never harm his family. But he had associates who are another matter. Men who do the devil’s work.”
“Sir?” Clete said.
“They sell arms in Africa. I visited Hugo before his escape. He wanted to come clean on his life and get shut of the wrongful things he did.”
“Do you know the names of these guys selling weapons?”
“No, sir.”
“Would anybody else here know?”
“We have nothing to do with those kinds of people. Would you like to have something to eat with us?”
“Yes, I would,” Clete replied. “Thank you.”
He walked with Preacher to the picnic tables in the shade. The white truck was still parked among the pines on the far side of the lake; the folding door on the passenger side was open. Clete thought he saw the sun glint on a pair of binoculars. A jolly fat woman handed him a ham-and-onion sandwich. “You look like you’re fixing to fall down, you poor little thing. You better eat up.”
“Y’all have ice cream trucks hereabouts?” he asked.
“Like anywhere else, I guess,” she said “You don’t want my sandwich?”
“Yes, ma’am, I want it,” he said, biting into the bread.
“Hang around. I got more,” she said. She smiled broadly.
“Got to go to work.”
“I bet you were a deep-sea diver in the service,” she said, still beaming.
He tried to smile at her with his eyes and say nothing, but his energies were used up. “I always liked ham-and-onion sandwiches. Dinner on the ground and that sort of thing.”