I saw his jaw set and his eyes light angrily.
"I was going to bring him in," I said. "That's the truth, Captain. I let him go into the bathroom to take a leak, and he had a Walther taped inside the toilet tank. He called the play."
"No, you called the play when you started acting on your own authority, when you refused to accept the terms of your suspension, when you went as a vigilante into another state. I asked you at the hospital to have a little patience, a little trust. I guess those were wasted words."
"I respect you, Captain, but how much trust have people had in me?"
"Listen to what you're saying. Can you imagine making a statement like that in a courtroom?"
I felt my face flush, and I had to look away from his eyes.
"You still haven't told me everything, though, have you?" he said. "No."
"You left the scene and you didn't report it?"
"Yes."
"What else?"
"I think Purcel killed Bobby Joe Starkweather."
"What for?"
"I don't know."
"Maybe he was just riding around in St. Charles Parish one morning and decided he wanted to blow away a redneck," the Captain said.
"There was a witness. I have her name and where she works."
"But you didn't bother telling this to anyone before?"
"She's a doper and a hooker, Captain. Her brains are as soft as yesterday's ice cream. I didn't know what would happen to her if they kept her as a material witness, either."
"I'm having a hard time assimilating all this, Dave. I hate to tell you this, but this Purcel business sounds like it came out of a bottle. Maybe his personal problems are about to screw up his career with the department, but he's not an assassin, for God's sakes."
I felt tired, empty, my options all spent, and all of it for no purpose whatsoever. The captain was a good man. I didn't know what I had expected of him, actually. In going to his house with my strange stories, I had given him even fewer alternatives than I had myself.
"Give me the address," he said. "I'm going to call the Biloxi police department. Then we need to go down to the station, and I think you should call an attorney."
He made the long-distance call, and I listened glumly while he talked with someone in their homicide division. I felt like a child whose errant behavior would now have to be taken over by a group of bemused authority figures. The captain finished and hung up the phone.
"They're sending a car out there and they'll call me back," he said.
I sat in the silence. "Did that black kid ever find anything in the mug books?"
"No, he was too scared, poor kid. We found out he's a little bit retarded, too. You don't think Murphy pulled the trigger?"
"No."
The captain blew air out of his nose. His fingers made a design on the arm of the couch as we sat in the gloom.
"Captain, did you hear anything about Didi Gee being indicted?"
"No, but you know how they are in the prosecutor's office. They dummy up on us sometimes, particularly when they're thinking about a roll of drums on the six-o'clock news. What did you hear?"
"He thinks he's going to be indicted."
"He told you this? You've been talking with Didi Gee?"