"An adopted daughter."
"How would you like it if somebody talked about her like you talk about my boy? How would you like it if my lawyers came after you through your family?"
"We"re not like you, Whitey. Dallas Klein"s blood is on your soul. On the day you die, I believe his specter will stand by your bedside. Nothing you do from now until then will change that fact. Your son is a monster. I have a feeling you know it, too."
For a moment I saw a look in Whitey"s eyes that made me believe there are some people who are truly d.a.m.ned. Then the moment pa.s.sed and he squinted into the haze and pinched the humidity out of his eyes. "I went to school under the Catholic nuns," he said. "They taught us after we p.i.s.sed not to shake off more than two times. Know what we did? We all ran down to the john and shook it off three times to see what would happen. Good try, Robicheaux, but you and your friend belong here. Like you say, it"s a place for jerk-offs."
Upstairs, Slim Bruxal pushed open a window and leaned outside, his upper torso naked. "Hey, Dad, can somebody give Carmen a ride back to the dorm? I"ve got a softball game," he said.
MY LIFE IS NOT GIVEN to prescient moments. But occasionally I have them, particularly with the advance of age. When they occur, they leave behind a sensation like a cold burn on the heart.
The sky was painted with horsetails, the trees blowing hard along the highway as I followed Clete out of Lafayette. Then he pulled into a truck stop and went inside, not glancing back to see if I was behind him.
When Clete made choices, even minuscule ones, that geographically separated him from his friends, he was usually embarking on an odyssey that invariably brought harm to only one person-himself.
I pushed open the door in the cafe area and saw him at the end of the counter, his aviator gla.s.ses in his pocket, the lines at the corners of his eyes like pieces of white thread, a bottle of beer and a foaming gla.s.s and a saltshaker in front of him. I cupped my hand on his shoulder.
"It"s twenty minutes after one," I said. "You haven"t eaten, either."
"I"m on a diet," he replied.
I sat down on the stool next to him and asked the waitress for coffee. "You did great back there, Cletus."
"Remember when we caught Augie Giacano jackrolling an old lady and threw him down a fire escape? Then we dimed him with Didi Gee so he"d get in trouble with his own people?"
"When you threw Augie down the fire escape."
"Whatever. We didn"t get pushed around by Brooklyn skells like Whitey Bruxal." He salted his beer and drank from it. He touched at his mouth with a paper napkin, then put the napkin aside, finished the gla.s.s in one swallow, and filled it again.
"Eat a hamburger with me," I said.
"Everything is muy copacetico, Streakus. No problemas here." His eyes drifted to the television anch.o.r.ed on the cafe wall. "Check out those tropical storms in the Atlantic. The Florida Straits are starting to look like a turnstile."
"I"ve got to get back to the department."
"See you later."
"I"m not leaving you here alone."
"What? I"m supposed to feel like the walking wounded?"
"Maybe."
"You don"t get it, Dave. You never did. We"re dinosaurs. This isn"t the same country we grew up in. The sc.u.mbags own it, from top to bottom. Except they"re legal now and have college degrees and wear two-thousand-dollar suits. Back in our First District days, we would have fed these motherf.u.c.kers into an airplane propeller."
A truck driver down the counter wearing a greasy bill cap looked at us, and the waitress studied the television screen with undue attention, then turned up the volume. A CNN announcer was talking about a hurricane that was strengthening off the Bahamas.
"The Bobbsey Twins from Homicide are forever," I said.
"Keep telling yourself that."
"Snap out of it, Clete."
This time he didn"t argue with me. But reticence in Clete Purcel was rarely a sign of acquiescence. Instead, it was the exact opposite. He put on his yellow-tinted shades and looked at the television screen, his face composed.
"You"re going to see Trish today?" I said.
"What about it?"
She"s too young for you. You"re going to get hurt real bad, perhaps irrevocably, I thought.
He stared into my eyes. "Yeah," he said.
"Yeah, what?" I said, trying to smile innocuously.
"Yeah, keep your thoughts to yourself," he replied.
It was one of the moments when the truth serves no purpose other than to keep our wounds green. Was Clete right? Were we at the end of our string, flailing at forces that had societal and governmental sanction, convincing ourselves, like fools popping champagne corks aboard a sinking liner, that our violence could extend our youth forever into the future and that the party would never come to an end?
He felt my eyes on the side of his face. "Why you giving me that weird look?"
"Because you"re the best, Clete. Because I love you."
The trucker down the counter was cutting up a steak on his plate. He glanced sideways at us, then at our reflection in the mirror. Clete leaned over so he could see past me.
"What"s up, bud?" Clete asked.
"Not a whole lot," the trucker said, returning to his steak. He had created a puddle of ketchup sprinkled with pepper on his plate, and he was dipping each piece of meat in it before he forked it into his mouth.
"That steak looks righteous. You want a beer?" Clete said.
"I got to drive. Another time," the trucker said.
"I"m Clete Purcel. This is Dave Robicheaux."
"I"m Joe Vernon Mack."
"You"re looking at the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide, Joe Vernon," Clete said.
"Pleased to meet y"all," the trucker said, chewing contentedly.
Clete picked up both our checks and paid for them at the cash register, then the two of us walked outside into the wind.
I ARRIVED BACK at the department shortly before 3 p.m. A note from Helen on a pink memorandum slip was waiting for me in my mailbox. It said: "See me." When I walked down to her office, her door was ajar and I could see her standing behind her desk, talking on the phone. She waved me inside.
"He"s here now," she said into the receiver. "Look, Lonnie, you made some ugly remarks about both him and me. He was defending me and this department as much as himself. You want to make trouble over this, you"ll have me to deal with as well. My advice is that you be a man and accept the fact you shot off your mouth and that you got what you deserved."
I could hear Lonnie Marceaux"s voice coming out of the receiver like a piece of wire being pulled through a metal hole.
"Stop shouting," Helen said. "He"s a good cop and you know it. If you want, I"ll contact the Daily Iberian and the wire services in Baton Rouge and we can both make a statement about what happened. It"s your call."
She held the receiver away from her head and looked at it.
"He hang up?" I said.
"Or shot himself. Except we don"t have that kind of luck around here. Somebody at Lafayette P.D. told him you busted up Lefty Raguza. He thinks you"re running your own program, one that probably conflicts with his. Lonnie wants it all, Dave."
"All what?"
"He"s going to indict Monarch Little for the Lujan homicide and bring racketeering charges against Whitey Bruxal. He"s also got Colin Alridge in his bomb sights. Alridge is running for lieutenant governor. Lonnie says he"s going to drive a nail through one of his t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es."
"Why don"t you use a more severe image?"
"Those are his words, not mine." She placed her hand on the windowsill and gazed out at the cemetery, and I knew she was no longer interested in talking about Lonnie. "I got a call earlier from the sheriff of Orleans Parish. He says a warrant is being cut for Clete Purcel"s arrest."
"For flooding the casino?"
But my question didn"t register. "The Orleans sheriff says there"re rumors Clete is mixed up with the people who did the savings and loan job in Mobile. This parish isn"t going to be a haven for people who think they don"t have to obey the law."
"I"ll talk with Clete."
"You tell him I said he gets this s.h.i.t off our plate or he leaves town."
"I understand you perfectly. Thanks for standing up for me with Lonnie," I said.
She looked me dead-on, her expression caught again in that strange androgynous moment when she seemed to linger between two ident.i.ties, her face both beautiful and intimidating, a Helen I didn"t really know. "Don"t try to jerk me around, Dave. Fun and games are over," she said.
I WALKED BACK to my office, unsure of my next move. I was convinced I had gotten nowhere with Whitey Bruxal. Worse, all my investigative work into the deaths of Crustacean Man, Yvonne Darbonne, and Tony Lujan had produced only circ.u.mstantial evidence and theories. Most depressing of all was the fact that, regardless of what I did, Lonnie Marceaux was going to use the evidence selectively to advance his own career, even if he had to prosecute Monarch Little, an innocent man, for the murder of Tony Lujan.
I"d had a run at Bruxal earlier, hoping to sow seeds of suspicion about his business partner, Bello Lujan. But why quit now? I asked myself. Some activities are like prayer. After you"ve been sh.e.l.led off the mound, what do you have to lose?
I waited until quitting time to drive to his horse farm outside Loreauville. From the state road I saw him in front of a long white stable, dressed in strap overalls, working on a faucet that fed a galvanized water tank. He looked up when he heard my truck thumping across the cattle-guard, his Stilson wrench suddenly motionless.
How do you deal with a man like Bellerophon Lujan? Do you hate him? He certainly deserved the odium attached to his name. He was ignorant, driven, corrupt, racist, superst.i.tious, and violent, his wealth ill-gotten, his libidinous appet.i.tes legendary. I believed he had probably raped Yvonne Darbonne. And long before he had destroyed her and her faith in her fellow human beings, he had ruined his son"s life with control and verbal abuse that disguised itself as love.
But as much as I despised Bello"s deeds, I could not hate the man. As my truck approached the horse tank, I saw him grin slightly at the edge of his mouth, and for just a moment I remembered the kid who had waited in the cold with a shine box at the Southern Pacific depot, hoping to catch a few customers before they checked in to the Frederic Hotel.
"You going to take a swing at me?" I said as I got out of my truck.
"I wouldn"t do that," he said, twisting the wrench on a three-inch nut. "I"m putting in a frost-free faucet this year, me. All these storms and droughts and hurricanes we been having? That means we gonna have some bad winters, yeah."
His accent, even his syntax, had changed, the rough edges of New Orleans gone, as though the voice of a simple Cajun boy of years ago were speaking. Except that early innocence was not one Bello would ever be allowed to reclaim, whether he knew it or not. I picked up a paint-skinned wood chair by the stable entrance and carried it back to the tank and sat down. The sun was low and buried inside rain clouds, the pasture dark with shade, the gra.s.s channeled by the wind. "You have a restful place here," I said.
"The best," he replied. His eyes took on the glimmerings of vindication and pride. But I believed another element was at work inside Bello during that moment. I suspected he was beginning to understand that the symbols of his triumph over the world would never pa.s.s on to his son, and that his victory over privation and rejection by the wellborn had become ashes in his mouth.
"See this?" I said.
"Yeah, one of those pocket voice recorders."
I clicked the recorder on, then off with my thumb. "I had a talk with Whitey Bruxal earlier today. I had this recorder running in my pocket. I was going to take you over the hurdles with it, Bello."
He was grinning and I could see he didn"t understand.
"I was going to play back snippets to you and let you have a little glimpse of what your business partner has to say when you"re not around," I said. "But you"re an intelligent man and I won"t treat you as less."
"I ain"t sure what that means."
"You can believe this or not. Either the Feds or Lonnie Marceaux are going to hang you by your thumbs. No matter how you cut it, you"ve got Whitey Bruxal as your fall partner."
"What you mean, fall partner?"
"He"s the guy you"re going down with. Is Whitey the kind of guy who will take a maximum sentence rather than rat out a friend? I don"t know the answer. But I bet you do."
"He was working a deal wit" you?"
"Put it this way. I doubt if Whitey would tell the truth to a corpse. But if I were on a burning plane with him and the plane carried only one parachute, I have a feeling who would end up wearing it."
Bello fitted the Stilson back on the faucet head and began to squeak the nut tighter, as though my words were of little interest to him. But I could see the fatigue in his face, and in his eyes the tangle of thoughts that probably waged war inside his head twenty-four hours a day.
"What would you do?" he asked.
"I don"t think you"ll ever experience any rest until you own up to your mistakes, Bello."
"Starting wit" what?"
"I think you attacked Yvonne Darbonne. I think her death is eating you alive. No amount of Holy Roller shouting in tongues is going to change that fact or relieve you of your guilt."
"Who tole you I did that?"
"It"s written all over you."
The heavy, oblong steel head of the Stilson rested on the rim of the aluminum tank, his hand grasped tightly around the shank. The back of his hand was brown, mottled with liver spots and lined with veins that looked like knotted package twine. I could hear a horse blowing inside the stable.
I supposed it was not a time to say anything. But there are moments when caution and restraint just don"t cut it. "Why"d you do it, partner? She was just a kid."
"Maybe there"re reasons everybody don"t know about. Maybe t"ings just happen," he replied.
"Run that c.r.a.p on somebody else."
"What do you know? You got everyt"ing. They killed my boy. You know what it"s like to have your kid killed?"
"Who"s "they"?"
"The n.i.g.g.e.rs. Monarch Little and all them n.i.g.g.e.rs with black scarfs on their head, selling their dope, pimping their women, corrupting the town."
It was hopeless. I think there are those who are psychologically incapable of honesty and I think Bello was one of them. I got back in the truck and left him to himself. In all candor, I doubt if a worse punishment in the world could have been visited upon him.
BUT I STILL HAD MILES TO GO before I slept. I called Molly on my cell phone and asked if we could have a late dinner.