The Glass Rainbow

CHAPTER 19

Early morning is a bad time for recovering drunks. The wall between the unconscious and the world of sleep is soft and porous, and the gargoyles have a way of slipping into the sunlight and fastening a talon or two into the back of your neck. Perhaps that is why I have always been an early riser, escaping into the blueness of the dawn and its healing properties before the power of memory and the dark energies of my previous life lay claim on my waking day.

But the funk and depression I brought back to town after my encounter with Emma Poche could not be blamed on the unconscious or my history of alcoholism and violence. A time comes in your life when the loudest sound in a room, any room, is the ticking of a clock. And the problem is not the amplified nature of the sound; the problem is that the sound is slowing, each tick a little further away than the one that preceded it. The first time this happened to me, I was in City Park on an autumn day, the smell of chrysanthemums and gas hanging in the trees. The breath went out of my chest and a sweat broke on my forehead. I sat down on a bench, the camellias and the bayou and the ball diamond slipping out of focus. I waited for the moment to pass, my mouth filling with a taste like pennies or blood from a fresh cut. I took off my wristwatch and shook it to make it stop ticking. Then I realized that people were staring at me, their faces disjointed with pity and concern.

“I’ve got malaria,” I said, my hands knotted between my knees, a weak smile on my mouth.

It’s not enough to call this a vision of mortality. In that moment, when watches and clocks misbehave and you feel a cold vapor wrap itself around your heart, you unconsciously draw a line at the bottom of a long column of numbers and come up with a sum. Perhaps it’s one that fills you with contentment and endows you with a level of courage and an acceptance that you didn’t know you possessed.

Or maybe not.

Maybe you wonder if you blew it, if you flipped away your yesterdays like cigarette butts that left a bad aftertaste. Or worst of all, you realize you have to leave the lives of others behind, the one you didn’t live and the ones you did not get to know adequately.

Helen Soileau probably had several women living inside her skin, but I had come to know only one or two of them. My daughter had grown from a terrified five-year-old refugee I had pulled from a submerged plane into an aspiring novelist and law student. My wife, Molly, had been a Catholic nun, a missionary in Central America, a labor organizer in southern Louisiana, and the wife of a police officer who had shed the blood of many men. I suspected that neither woman’s story was over. I also suspected I would not see the rest of their stories written.

Thoughts of this kind rob you of both faith and resolve. And my situation was further complicated by a phone call that Alafair picked up in the kitchen that afternoon. “Just a moment, please,” she said, pressing the mute button on the console. “It’s somebody named Emma. She sounds like she’s had a few drinks.”

I waited, thinking.

“I’ll tell her to call back.”

“That’s all right,” I said, taking the receiver from her. I placed it against my ear. I could hear people talking loudly and a jukebox playing in the background. “What’s shaking, Emma?”

“Screw you, Dave. One day I’ll pay you back for what you did today.”

“Is that the entirety of your message?”

“No. No matter what you think of me, I still have a conscience.”

“I’m listening.”

There was a long silence.

“Emma?”

“They’re gonna cap you and anybody who’s with you.”

“Who is?”

“God, you’re dumb,” she said, and broke the connection.

My ear felt cold when I set the receiver down in the cradle.

“What is it, Dave?” Alafair asked.

“That was Emma Poche. She’s a deputy sheriff in St. Martin Parish. Her boat must have left the dock a little early today.”

But I kept staring at Alafair, my words banal and silly, poorly disguising the portent of Emma’s call.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked.

“She said I was in danger, as well as anyone who might be with me.”

“Danger from whom?”

“She hung up without saying.”

“Let’s have a talk with her.”

“I did that this morning. Maybe this is her way of getting even or appeasing her conscience. She’s a drunk, and nothing she says is reliable.”

Alafair sat down at the breakfast table and gazed out the back window. Molly was feeding Tripod on top of his hutch, and Snuggs was watching both of them from a fork in the tree overhead. “I have to tell you something, Dave,” Alafair said.

“What is it?”

“I heard two deputies in uniform talking in the booth next to me in McDonald’s. They were talking about the guys who tried to kill you and Clete in Jeff Davis Parish. One of them said, ‘I wonder if Robicheaux is starting to see black helicopters.’”

“Who cares what he said?”

“I care,” she said.

“Did you say something to this guy?”

“I told him he’d better keep his mouth off you or he’d be wearing his Big Mac on his head.”

I sat down next to her and put my arm around her shoulders. Her back was as stiff and hard as a stump. “Even when you were a little bitty girl, you were heck on wheels, Alf.”

When she looked back at me, there were tears in her eyes. “You’re better than all these people, Dave. They don’t deserve you.”

“I’m better than no one.”

“This Poche woman is in St. Martinville?”

“Bad idea,” I said.

“Where does she live?”

“Stay away from her,” I said. “Are you listening, Alf? Come back here.”

It was dark and rain had started to fall before Alafair found the cypress house on the bayou where Emma Poche lived. Only one light burned in the house, perhaps in a back bedroom. The light fell out into the backyard, where a barbecue pit with an open top smoldered under a live oak, the smoke rising into the leaves in an acrid flume.

The tide was in, and Bayou Teche was high and swollen with mud, the surface chained with rain rings. A speedboat was moored among the flooded elephant ears, a tarp thrown carelessly over the console and the front seat. Alafair could hear music playing inside the cypress house. She could also hear wind chimes tinkling on the gallery and the sound of someone’s voice rising and falling above the music. She stepped up on the gallery and started to tap on the door. Then she realized what she was hearing, a soliloquy of need and debasement, a confession of personal inadequacy made by someone who was either drunk or morally insane or without any vestige of self-respect.

“I’ve done everything you wanted,” the voice said. “But you treat me like fingernail parings. I’m supposed to fuck you on demand and never expect a kind word, and act like that’s normal. I bought a roast and a cake and fixed your potatoes just the way you like them. I thought we’d eat and go out in public or go to New Orleans and stay at the Monteleone. I don’t have a career or a life anymore. All I have is you. Come back to bed. Let me hold you.”

Alafair stepped back, unsure what she should do next. Then she took a breath and knocked hard on the door. The inside of the house went silent. “Ms. Poche, it’s Alafair Robicheaux. I need to speak to you,” she said.

She heard the sound of feet moving across the floor and a door opening in back. She knocked again, this time harder. “Ms. Poche, one way or another, you’re going to talk to me,” she said.

She walked around to the side of the house. Someone wearing a flop hat and a raincoat was walking rapidly through the trees and down the slope to the bayou. The electricity leaping between the clouds lit the moored speedboat and the banks of flooded elephant ears and the small waves capping among the cypress knees. The person picked up the weighted painter and stepped up on the speedboat’s bow in a single motion, then pushed the electric starter on the engine and backed into the current. In seconds, the boat was splitting a trough down the middle of the bayou.

Alafair went back to the gallery. Emma Poche was standing behind the screen door, backlit by a lamp she had turned on in the living room. She wore jeans and a blouse that exposed a bra strap. “What do you want?” she said, her hair in disarray, her breath rife with the odor of cigarettes and alcohol.

“You called my father this afternoon.”

“What about it?”

“You said someone was going to kill him and anybody he was with.”

“I have no memory of a conversation like that.”

In the glow of the lamp, Alafair could see the streaked makeup on Emma Poche’s face, the swollen eyes, the smear of lipstick on her teeth. “I answered the phone,” Alafair said. “I handed the receiver to my father. I listened while he talked to you. Don’t lie to me.”

“What did you say?”

“May I come in?”

“No, you can’t,” Emma replied, reaching for the latch on the screen.

But Alafair jerked open the door and went inside. “If you want to call 911 and report an intruder, you can use my cell.” When Emma didn’t reply, Alafair said, “Who was the person who just left?”

“I don’t have to tell you anything. Who do you think you are? Your father has hallucinations. Everybody knows it. He’s one of those dry alcoholics who would be better off drunk.”

“My father is the kindest, most decent human being you’ll ever meet. I feel sorry for you, Ms. Poche—”

“It’s Deputy Poche.”

“I advise you to shut your mouth and listen, Deputy Poche. I found out where you live from Clete Purcel. I also found out you were the woman who tried to set him up for the murder of Herman Stanga. That’s about as low as it gets. I had a hard time imagining what kind of woman could do that to a man like Clete. I tried to see you in my mind’s eye, but I couldn’t. Then I stood on your gallery and heard you begging affection from somebody to whom you’re obviously a throwaway fuck. If you weren’t so pathetic, I’d slap you all over your own house.”

“You little bitch, you can’t talk to me like that.”

“Who are the men who tried to kill Dave?”

“I don’t know.”

Involuntarily, Alafair raised her hand.

“You listen to me, girl,” Emma said. “We can die and become humps out in a field, and two days after we’re gone, nobody but our families will remember who we were. Look around you. You see the trailer slums on the bayou and the crack dealers on the street? You think Dave or you or me can change the way things work here? We’re little people. You think I’m the only person around here who’s a disposable fuck? You like the way you got treated by Kermit Abelard?”

“What do you know about Kermit?”

“Better question, what don’t I know about him? He used you. But while he was getting in your pants, he was taking it between the cheeks from Robert Weingart.”

Alafair used the full flat of her hand to slap Emma Poche across the face. She hit her so hard, spittle rocketed from Emma’s mouth.

Emma sat down on the couch, her left cheek glowing from the blow, her eyes out of focus. “You feel sorry for me? I have a high school degree. You’re a Stanford law student. Which one of us got used the worst? Which one of us shared her lover with a sleazy con man who date-rapes teenage girls? I could have you locked up and charged, but I’m gonna let you slide. Now get out of my house.”

Alafair’s gaze dropped to the coffee table. “What are you doing with this book?” she asked.

“Reading it?”

“Who just left here?”

“No one. As far as I’m concerned, you’ve imagined everything that’s happened here tonight.”

“You’re reading Kermit’s novel about the Battle of Shiloh?”

“You keep your hands off my book.”

“Did Kermit give you this, Ms. Poche?”

“Why would you think that? Why wouldn’t you assume I bought it at a store?”

“Because everything else on your bookshelf is trash.”

“You give me that,” Emma said, getting to her feet.

Alafair peeled back the book’s pages to the frontispiece. The inscription read:

Carolyn?

I did not see Alafair until the next morning, when I was fixing breakfast and she came into the kitchen in her bathrobe. I poured her a glass of orange juice and fixed her a cup of coffee and hot milk and set the glass and the coffee cup and saucer in front of her at the table. I didn’t ask her where she had gone the previous night or what she had done. I went outside and fed Snuggs and Tripod and came back in. Then she told me everything that had happened at Emma Poche’s house in St. Martinville.

“You hit her?” I said.

“She’s lucky that’s all I did.”

“You didn’t get a good look at the person going out the back door?”

“No, but I saw the boat. It looked like the one Kermit owns. I can’t be sure. When I saw his novel on her table, I thought maybe Kermit had left it. Except the inscription is to a tennis player named Carolyn. Does that mean anything to you?”

“Yeah, it does. Carolyn Blanchet, Layton Blanchet’s widow. She played on the tennis team at LSU. I think she’s still the seventh-ranked doubles amateur in the state.”

“Layton Blanchet, that guy who was running a Ponzi scheme of some kind? He shot himself at his camp?”

“I think Layton was probably murdered.”

“You think Carolyn Blanchet is involved with Emma Poche? That maybe she was the one who went out the back door?”

“It’s possible.”

“Like maybe they’re getting it on?”

“Could be. A lot of things about Emma would start to make sense.”

I set a plate of eggs and two strips of bacon in front of Alafair. She had been frowning, but now her expression was clear, her hands resting on top of the table, her long fingers slightly curled, her fingernails as pink as seashells. “I thought maybe—”

“That Kermit was Emma’s lover?”

“Yeah, but that wasn’t what bothered me. I thought maybe he was involved with something really dark. With killing Herman Stanga or setting up Clete. But it wasn’t Kermit who went out Emma’s back door, was it?”

“I’m not sure about anything when it comes to the Abelards,” I replied. “Their kind have been dictators in our midst for generations and admired for it. They created a culture in which sycophancy became a Christian virtue.”

But she was staring out the window, not listening to abstractions, her food growing cold. “No, it wasn’t Kermit. I’m sure of it now. My imagination was running overtime. Are you mad at me for going after Emma Poche?”

“I’ve never been mad at you for any reason, Alafair.”

“Never?”

“Not once.”

“Drink a cup of coffee with me.”

“You want to tell me something else?”

“No,” she said. “Look at Tripod. He just climbed up in the tree. He hasn’t done that in weeks. Don’t you love our home? I don’t know any place I would rather wake up in the morning.”

I couldn’t catch Helen Soileau until she came out of an administrative meeting with the mayor after eleven A.M. I followed her into her office, but before I could speak, she gave me the results of her attempt to confirm my account about the shoot-out on the river in Jeff Davis Parish.

“Within the time frame we’re using, no hospital in the state has reported a gunshot wound that matches your description of the one you think you inflicted on the man by the river,” she said. “Nor has there been a report on any dumped bodies that would match those of Vidor Perkins or the guy you think caught a forty-five round through the lungs. No airports anywhere between Lake Charles, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans know anything about a crop duster flying around during the storm, either.”

“Crop dusters don’t need airports. They land in farm pastures every day. And I don’t think I shot those guys, Helen. I blew up their shit at almost point-blank range.”

“Does bwana want to be clever, or does bwana want to hear what I’ve found?”

“Sorry.”

“The locals found some bloody rags on the side of the road. There was a piece of flesh with part of a fingernail on it inside one of the rags.”

“Enough to get a print?”

“No. But enough to run a DNA search through the national database. So far we still don’t know who these guys are or where they’re from or who they work for. Timothy Abelard probably did business with the Giacano family in New Orleans. You don’t think they’re part of Didi Gee’s old crowd?”

“No, these guys were too sophisticated.”

“The Mob isn’t up to the challenge? They kidnapped Jimmy Hoffa in broad daylight on a Saturday afternoon in front of a Detroit restaurant, and to this day no one has ever been in custody for it and no one has any idea where his body is. You think the guys who pulled that off were kitchen helpers in an Italian restaurant?”

“These guys were military.”

“You know that?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“How?”

“They never spoke. They didn’t have any visible jewelry. They wore the same hooded raincoats, like a uniform, so their enemy could not distinguish one of them from the other, so their impersonality would make them seem even more dangerous and formidable. ‘Black ops’ isn’t an arbitrary term and has more than one connotation.”

She ticked her nails on her desk blotter. “I hope you’re wrong. We hardly have the resources to send our local morons to Angola. What’d you come in here to tell me?”

“Emma Poche called me up when she was loaded and told me I was in danger.”

“From?”

“I asked her that. She told me how dumb I was.”

“What else?”

“Alafair went to Emma’s house last night and confronted her.”

“To what degree do you mean ‘confronted’?”

“She slapped her. She also caught her with a lover. Maybe the lover is Carolyn Blanchet.”

I saw a glint catch in Helen’s eye like a sliver of flint. Then I remembered that she and Carolyn Blanchet had been at LSU at the same time, that something had happened involving a friend of Helen. Rejection by a sorority because of the friend’s sexual orientation? I couldn’t remember.

“Run that by me again,” Helen said.

“Somebody was in Emma’s house when Alafair was at the front door. Emma was delivering a litany of grief about her mistreatment at this person’s hands. But whoever it was left through the back without Alafair seeing him or her. Alafair said a copy of Kermit Abelard’s last novel was on the coffee table. It was inscribed to someone named Carolyn.”

“That doesn’t make it Carolyn Blanchet’s.”

“The inscription indicated this particular Carolyn was a champion tennis player and a longtime supporter of Kermit’s work. Carolyn once told me she was a big fan of Kermit’s books. I don’t think it’s coincidence. I think we’ve been looking in the wrong place.”

I had lost her attention. “That slut,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“You and I need to take a ride.”

“I can handle it, Helen.”

“What you can do is get on the phone and tell Ms. Blanchet we’re on our way to her house and her prissy twat had better be there when we arrive.”

When Clete Purcel was a patrolman in New Orleans and, later, a detective-grade plainclothes, he had been feared by the Mob as well as the hapless army of miscreants who dwelled like slugs on the underside of the city. But their fear of Clete had less to do with his potential for violence than the fact that he did not obey rules or recognize traditional protocol. More important, he seemed indifferent to his own fate. He was not simply the elephant in the clock shop. He was the trickster of folk legend, the psychedelic merry prankster, Sancho Panza stumbling out of the pages of Cervantes, willing to create scenes and situations in public that were so outrageous, pimps and porn actors and street dips who robbed church boxes were embarrassed by them. Whenever I hesitated, his admonition was always the same: “You got to take it to them with tongs, big mon. You got to spit in the lion’s mouth. Two thirds of these guys never completed toilet training. Come on, this is fun.”

Maybe because of his visceral hatred of Robert Weingart, or his conviction that Timothy Abelard trailed the vapors of the crypt from his wheelchair, Clete decided to take a ride down to the Abelard compound on the southern rim of St. Mary Parish. It was a fine day for it, he told himself. The rain had quit; the clouds were soft and white against a blue sky; the oaks along Bayou Teche looked washed and thick with new leaves. What was there to lose? His gold pen had been stolen from him and used to set him up for the killing of Herman Stanga. He still had resisting-arrest charges against him because of his flight from the St. Martin cops the night he busted up Herman Stanga behind the Gate Mouth club. His best friend had almost been clipped in that gig down by the river in Jeff Davis Parish, then had been dissed by the local cops. In the meantime, Clete had watched a pattern that seemed to characterize his experience in law enforcement for over three decades: The puppeteers got blow jobs while their throwaway minions stacked time or got their wicks snuffed.

He put down the top on his Caddy, made a stop at a convenience store for a six-pack of Bud and a grease-stained bag of white boudin still warm from the microwave, and motored on down the road, Jerry Lee Lewis blaring “Me and Bobby McGee” from the stereo.

Outside Franklin, he drove south on the two-lane through a corridor of gum and hackberry trees and slash pines that grew along the edge of flooded sawgrass and expanses of saltwater intrusion where the grass had turned the color of urine. As he neared the Abelard compound, he saw a pickup truck backed into a cleared area that contained a cast-iron Dumpster. The top of the Dumpster was open, and a large black woman wearing rubber boots was standing in the truck bed, hefting a series of plastic garbage bags and flinging them into the Dumpster.

Abelard’s nurse, he thought. What was her name? Had Dave said she was Abelard’s out-of-wedlock daughter? A white man was sitting in the cab of the truck reading a sports magazine, his door open to catch the breeze.

Clete turned in to the clearing, cut the engine, and set his can of Bud on the floor. “Need a hand with that?” he said.

The black woman paused in her work, studying Clete, trying to place him. “No, suh, we got it,” she said. She flung a heavy sack with both hands into the Dumpster.

Clete got out of the Caddy and removed his shades and stuck them in his shirt pocket. His shoes were shined, his golf slacks ironed with sharp creases, his flowery sport shirt still crisp from the box. “It’s Miss Jewel, isn’t it?” he said.

“Yes, suh. You came out for lunch one day with Mr. Robicheaux.”

Clete glanced at the white man behind the wheel. His hair was peroxided and clipped short, the sideburns long and as exact as a ruler’s edge, his jaw square. He never lifted his eyes from the magazine. Clete picked up two large vinyl bags and walked them to the Dumpster and tossed them inside.

“I got the rest of them, suh. It’s not any trouble,” Jewel said.

Clete nodded and put an unlit Lucky Strike in his mouth and gazed across the road at the wood bridge that led to the Abelard compound. A blue heron was rising from the lily pads that grew in the water by the bridge, the edges of its wings rippling in the wind. “Got a match?” he said to the man behind the steering wheel.

“Don’t smoke,” the man said, not looking up.

“Got a lighter in there?”

“It doesn’t work.”

Clete nodded again. “Have I seen you somewhere?”

This time the man held Clete’s gaze. “I couldn’t say.” He sucked on a mint. His eyes were of a kind that Clete had seen before, sometimes in his dreams, sometimes in memory. They didn’t blink; they didn’t probe; they contained no curiosity about the external world. They made Clete think of cinders that had been consumed by their own heat.

“You a military man?” Clete asked.

“No.”

“But you were in, right?”

“Ruptured disk.”

Clete pulled his unlit cigarette from his mouth and held it up like an exclamation point. “I got it. That’s why you couldn’t help Miss Jewel out.”

The man dropped his eyes to the magazine, then seemed to give it up, as though his few minutes of retreat from the distractions of the world had been irreparably damaged. He closed the door and started the engine, his mouth working on the mint while he waited for the black woman to get in.

“You know where I think I’ve seen you?” Clete said.

“Couldn’t even guess.”

“I was looking through some binoculars. You were in a field down by a river in Jeff Davis Parish. It was raining. Ring any bells? Some heavy shit went down. Maybe a couple of your friends got their lasagna slung all over the bushes. I never forget a face.”

“Sorry, I’m from Florida. I think you’re confused.”

“It wasn’t you? I would swear it was. You guys know how to kick ass. It was impressive.”

“Watch your foot.”

Clete stepped back as the man cut the wheel and turned in a circle, opening the passenger door for the black woman. Clete pointed his finger at the driver. “Airborne, I bet. That’s how you got that ruptured disk. You’re doing scut work for the Abelards and Robert Weingart now? That must be like drinking out of a spittoon. I bet you’ve got some stories to tell.”

As the truck crossed the two-lane and turned onto the wood bridge that spanned the moat around the Abelard house, Clete memorized the tag and dialed a number on his cell phone. Then he lost service and had to punch in the number a second time. The call went into voice mail. “Dave, it’s Clete. I’m outside the Abelard place. I need you to run a Florida tag. It belongs to a real piece of work, maybe one of the shitbags from the gig on the river. I tried to rattle him but didn’t have any luck.” He closed his eyes and said the tag number into the cell. “Get back to me, noble mon. Out.”

Clete rumbled across the bridge and up the knoll that formed the island on which Timothy Abelard’s columned manor stood like an abandoned shell from a movie set. The pickup truck driven by the man from Florida was parked by the carriage house, but no one was in sight. When Clete knocked on the door, he could hear no one inside. “Hello?” he called out. No response.

He walked around the side of the house, past a chicken coop and an ancient brick cistern that was veined with dead vines. In the backyard the black woman was hoeing in a vegetable garden, a sunbonnet tied under her chin, her big arms flexing as she notched weeds out of the rows planted with carrots and radishes. Clete did not speak when he walked up behind her, though he had no doubt she was aware of his presence. He took off his hat and studied the refracted glare of the sun inside the flooded cypress snags between the house and the bay. “Mr. Abelard home?” he said.

The woman kept her eyes on her work, a line of sweat sliding out of her bonnet onto her forehead. “No, suh.”

“Where is he?”

“Gone to Lafayette for his dialysis.”

“As his nurse, wouldn’t you normally go along with him?”

“I got chores to do here.”

“Is Kermit or Robert Weingart around?”

“No, suh, they’re in New Orleans for the day.”

“What’s the deal on our peroxided friend from Florida, Miss Jewel?”

Locks of her hair hung outside her bonnet. They were threaded with silver, damp with her work and the humidity that seemed to rise from the composted soil and the dead water surrounding the knoll. Her hoe was rising and falling faster, thudding into the ground, flashing in the sun. “Your name is Mr. Clete, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Clete said.

“You need to leave, suh. It’s not a good time for you to be here.”

“You in trouble, Miss Jewel?”

“No, suh. I been here all my life. I was born in the quarters, back up the road where the old mill use to be. I just do my job. I go my own way. Nothing bad is gonna happen to me.”

“Who’s the dude from Florida?”

She looked out of the corner of her eye toward the house. “I got to get these radishes hoed out. Then I’m fixing a big salad for Mr. Timothy. People have their problems and their grief, then it passes. Mess with it and it gets all over you.”

Clete heard a screen door open and swing back on a spring. The black woman’s hands tightened on the hoe handle, her triceps knotting as she scratched and clicked the blade frenetically between the vegetable rows.

“If you have business on the property, you need to call first and make an appointment,” the man with the peroxided hair said to Clete.

“Give me a number and I’ll get right on that.”

“It’s unlisted.”

“That kind of makes it hard to call.”

“Take it up with Mr. Abelard or his grandson. I’m just the hired help.”

“You’re doing a heck of a job, too.”

“Anything else?”

“Can I park out on the road?”

“Do whatever you want, long as it’s not on this side of the bridge.”

“I didn’t get your name.”

“I didn’t give it. Go start dinner, Jewel. I’ll be along in a bit.”

“Yes, suh.”

The man from Florida watched her walk into the shade of the house and lean her hoe against the back steps and go inside. Then he fixed his gaze on Clete. His face had the youthful tautness of an athlete’s, but there were three parallel lines across his brow with tiny nodules of skin in them, like beads on a string, that gave his face a dirty, aged look. “You a PI?”

“Why would you think that?”

“Leave me a business card. I got my job to do, but I try to give a guy a break if I can.”

“I think your job is to keep Miss Jewel from talking to outsiders.”

“Then you thought wrong.”

“I think you already know my name. I think you didn’t answer the door because you were busy running my tag.”

The man from Florida glanced at his wristwatch. “In five minutes, I’m gonna look out the front window. Leave or stay. But if you stay, you’re gonna be on your way to the parish jail.”

“No problem,” Clete said. “By the way, Miss Jewel doesn’t give up family secrets, whatever they might be. So don’t be acting like she did after I’m gone. You got my drift on that?”

The man from Florida stepped closer to Clete, into his shadow, his face turned up into Clete’s. His right foot was pulled behind his left and set at a slight angle, the instinctive posture of someone who was trained in at least one of the martial arts. An odor like male musk or stale antiperspirant rose from his armpits. “It’s no coincidence you got beer on your breath this early in the morning. You’re a retread, pal, way beyond your limits. Eat a big dinner and get drunk or get yourself laid. Do something you can handle. But don’t mouth off to the wrong people again. Juicer or not, a guy your age ought to know that.”

The man walked back to the house, stooping to pick up the hoe from the steps and hang it on a garden-shed hook, as though Clete were not there.

Clete went back out to his Caddy and sat behind the wheel, biting a hangnail. He drained the open can of beer that rested on the floor, but it was flat and hot and tasted sour in his mouth. He stared at the front of the house, the scaling paint on its stone columns, the dormers upstairs that seemed piled with junk, the nests of mud daubers and yellow jackets under the eaves, the loops of cobweb on the fans that hung over the upstairs veranda.

Clete thought of his childhood in the old Irish Channel and the predawn milk deliveries he made with his father in the Garden District. He remembered a splendid antebellum home off St. Charles Avenue and the kindly woman who lived there and asked him to come back on Saturday afternoon for ice cream. When he had shown up, dressed in his best clothes, the backyard was crowded with street urchins and raggedy black children from across Magazine. He returned later with a bag full of rocks and broke out all the glass in her greenhouse. Now, as he stared at the Abelard home, he tried to think of a term that described it and the history it represented: a cheap fraud, a house of cards, a place where Whitey could boss around his darkies and live off somebody else’s sweat.

But he knew those weren’t the appropriate words. The house meant nothing, and the people in it, such as the Abelards, were, like the rest of us, eventually dust in the wind. The real story was one that people seldom figured out. It was that the Abelards and their kind had taught others to disrespect themselves, and in large numbers they had done exactly that. Clete poured his beer out on the gravel, crunched the can in his palm, and tossed the can in the flower bed.

As he was driving across the wood bridge, his cell phone rang. He checked the caller ID, then placed the phone to his ear. “Talk to me, big mon,” he said.

He turned off the bridge and pulled the Caddy to the side of the road and listened. While he listened, he gazed at the blue Dumpster set back in the cleared space across the road, a bib of flattened trash scattered around its perimeter, a thick green stand of brush and persimmon trees behind it. “Andy Swan, huh?” he said. “Okay, I’m going to do some archaeological research while I’m here, and we’ll ROA for dinner when I get back to New Iberia. No, everything is copacetic. I’m extremely cool and serene and mellow and thinking only cool thoughts. Do not worry, noble mon. No, there is no problem here in St. Mary Parish that is not totally under control. Out.”

He parked in front of the Dumpster, retrieved a pair of bolt cutters and polyethylene gloves from the trunk, and cut the cable that was locked down in a V-shaped configuration on the Dumpster’s steel lid.

He began his search by splitting open the piled vinyl bags and shaking out their contents. Among the persimmons, he found a broken tree branch on the ground and used it to rake among the plastic bottles and tin cans and shrimp shells and Perrier and wine bottles and decayed food that the Abelards and their guest Robert Weingart had amassed in a week’s time. He was about to give it up when he spied, on the Dumpster’s floor, a strip of white plastic that was tongued on one end and notched with a hole on the other, the sides serrated like tiny teeth.

He dropped the plastic strip into a Ziploc bag. Behind him, the pickup truck driven by the man from Florida rattled over the plank bridge and angled across the asphalt and pulled to a stop lengthwise behind Clete’s Caddy. The man got out and slammed the door behind him. “I don’t believe you,” he said.

“I’m about to leave. I’d appreciate you moving your truck,” Clete said.

“What you’re gonna do is clean up this mess. What you’re also gonna do is put anything you found back where you got it.”

Clete scratched the back of his neck as though an insect had just bitten him. “No, I don’t think that’s on the table today.”

“Did you come out here to get beat up or drug off in handcuffs? You just like to walk into buzz saws? You get off on pissing in the punch bowl? Which is it?”

“See, I just found what looks to be a ligature. Or maybe it’s just a strip of plastic used to hang pipe. What’s your opinion, Mr. Swan?”

“I’m supposed to be impressed because you got somebody to run my tag?”

“No, there’s nothing interesting about me. But you, that’s a different deal. You were a member of the execution team at Raiford back when they were still using the chair. You were one of the guys who shaved their head and put a diaper on them so they wouldn’t mess themselves in front of the witnesses. That’s major-league impressive. Is it true y’all packed cotton and lubricant up their anus before you put on the diaper? That’s what I’ve always heard. Y’all have to train much for that?”

“I usually try to stay objective about my job and not get personalities mixed up in it. But for you, I think I’m gonna make an exception,” Andy Swan said.

Clete lifted his arms away from his sides. “No piece, no slapjack, no cuffs, no shank, no weapons of any kind. I’m no threat to you, Mr. Swan.”

“I know. You’re just a jolly fat man, probably a guy who got kicked off the force somewhere for taking freebies from crack whores or going on a pad for greaseballs. Now you carry a badge anybody can buy in a pawnshop and stick your dick in Bourbon Street skanks and pretend you’re still a player. Maybe I didn’t get it all exactly right, but I’m close, aren’t I?”

“Take your hand out from under the seat and step back from your vehicle,” Clete said.

“Or?”

“I’ve got enough room to get my Caddy out,” Clete said. “When I’m gone, you can call the locals or go about your business. No fuss, no muss.”

“You asked about stuffing cotton up their ass. I never did that. I shaved their head and put the electrode paste on and strapped the mask on their face. I strapped it so tight they couldn’t breathe. I think some of them suffocated before the electricity cooked their insides. I know for sure blood ran out of their nose and mouth and sometimes their eyes. And I hope every one of them suffered. Why? Because they deserved it. What do you think of that?”

Clete didn’t answer. Andy Swan straightened up and turned around, the stun gun in his hand buzzing with a blue-white arc. “Let’s trim a little of that fat off you,” he said.

“Why don’t we do this instead?” Clete said. With all his weight, he rammed the branch he had been using as a rake into Andy Swan’s face, the dried, sun-hardened tips spearing into the man’s eyes and nostrils and mouth and cheeks. Andy Swan crashed against the side of his truck, dropping the stun gun, pressing the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. Clete grabbed him by the back of the collar and spun him around and drove his face against the truck cab. Then he did it again and again, his fingers sunk deep into the back of Swan’s neck, Swan’s nose bursting against the metal. When Clete stopped, Andy Swan could barely stand.

Walk away, walk away, walk away, a voice kept repeating in Clete’s head.

He stepped back, his hands at his sides. The blue Dumpster, the garbage on the ground, the persimmon trees and the Caddy and the pickup truck were all spinning around him now. Andy Swan’s face resembled a red-and-white balloon floating in front of him.

“I’m done,” Swan said. He tried to cup the blood running from his nose. “I take back what I said. I don’t want any more trouble.”

“Who killed the girls?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who tried to kill Dave Robicheaux?”

Andy Swan shook his head and spat a broken tooth into his palm.

“Are you deaf? Do you think I enjoy this? Answer me,” Clete said.

“I don’t know anything, man. I just do security.”

“You dissing me again? You think I’m stupid? You think I get off knocking around gumballs?”

“Suck my dick.”

Clete drove his fist into Swan’s stomach, doubling him over, dropping him to his knees. Strings of blood and saliva hung from Swan’s mouth. His back was shaking. He raised his left hand in the air, signaling Clete not to hit him again. “I got here three days ago from Florida. Check me out. I work for a security service in Morgan City. I’m just an ex-cop. I’m no different from you.”

“You ever say that last part again, you’re going to have some serious problems.”

Clete picked up the stun gun, walked out into the trees, and threw it into a pond. When he returned to the Dumpster area, Andy Swan was still on his knees. Clete lifted him up by one arm.

“What are you doing?” Swan said.

“Nothing. And neither are you. You’re going to get a lot of track between you and Louisiana. And you’re going to do that now. You’re not going back to the Abelard house and give that black woman a lot of grief. You’re changing your zip code as we speak.”

“If that’s what you say.”

Clete’s gaze lifted into the trees, his eyelids fluttering. “I don’t recommend equivocation and a lack of specificity at this time. Are we connecting here?”

“Yeah.”

“Say again?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good man. Take this in the right spirit. Those guys you fried at Raiford? You’ll see them again.”

“They’re dead. We electrocuted them.”

“That’s the point,” Clete said. “Turn east at the four-lane. You got a straight shot all the way to Pensacola.”