“Another thing, this is personal, I'm no guy on a cross. In medieval times, I would have been one of those guys selling pigs' bones for saints' relics. The reality is I got innocent people's blood on my hands.”
“I don't know what to tell you, partner.”
“I'm not going away, Dave. You'll see me around.”
“That's what I'm afraid of,” I said. He didn't answer. For some reason I imagined him on a long, empty beach where the waves were lashed by wind but made no sound. “Good-bye, Sonny,” I said, and replaced the receiver in the cradle.
An hour later the thunder had stopped and the rain was falling steadily on the gallery's tin roof. Clete's chartreuse Cadillac convertible, with fins and grillwork like a torn mouth, bounced through the chuckholes in the road and turned into my drive. He ran through the puddles under the trees, his keys and change jingling in his slacks, one hand pressed on top of his porkpie hat.
“They gave you the deep six, huh, big mon?” he said. He sat in the swing and wiped his face on his sleeve.
“Who told you?”
“Helen.”
“You're on a first-name basis now?”
“She met me at my office last night. She doesn't like seeing her partner get reamed. I don't either.” He looked at his watch.
“Don't put your hand in it, Clete.”
“You afraid your ole podjo's going to leave gorilla shit on the furniture?”
I made a pocket of air in my cheek.
“You want to go partners in my agency?” he said. “Hey, I need the company. I'm a grunt for Wee Willie Bimstine and Nig Rosewater. My temp's an ex-nun. My best friends are mutts in the city prison. The desk sergeant at First District wouldn't spit in my mouth.”
“Thanks, anyway, Cletus. I don't want to move back to New Orleans.”
“We'll open a branch here in New Iberia. Leave it to me, I'll set it up.”
Several nightm
arish visions floated before my eyes. Clete looked at his watch. “You got anything to eat?” he said.
“Help yourself.”
He walked through the house to the kitchen and came back on the gallery with a bowl of Grape-Nuts and a tall glass of coffee and hot milk. His teeth made a grinding sound while he ate. His eyes glanced at his watch again.
“Who you expecting?” I said.
“I'm meeting Helen in town. She's photocopying Sonny's diary for me.”
“Bad idea.”
He stopped chewing and his face stretched as tight as pig hide. He raised his spoon at me.
“Nobody fucks my podjo, pardon the word in your house,” he said.
I felt like the soldier who enlists at the outset of a war, then discovers, after his energies and blood lust have waned, that there is no separate peace, that he's a participant until the last worthless shot is fired on the last worthless day. Sonny was right. There are no administrative suspensions, no more so than when pistol flares burst overhead and flood the world with a ghostly white light and you turn into the skeletal, barkless shape of a tree.
When the rain stopped and the sky began to clear and gradually turn blue again, I took Alafair's pirogue and rowed it into the swamp. The stands of cypress were bright green and dripping with rainwater, and under the overhang every dead log and gray sand spit was covered with nutrias.
I slid the pirogue into a cove and ate a ham and onion sandwich and drank from a cold jar of sun tea.
Oftentimes when you work a case and the players and events seem larger than life, you leapfrog across what at first seems the minuscule stuff of police procedural novels. Details at a crime scene seldom solve crimes. The army of miscreants whose detritus we constantly process through computers and forensic laboratories usually close their own files by shooting themselves and one another, OD-ing on contaminated drugs, getting dosed with AIDS or busted in the commission of another crime, or perhaps turning over a liquor store where the owner had tired of being cleaned out and introduces the robber to Messieurs Smith & Wesson.
Several years ago the wire services reported rumors that Jimmy Hoffa's body had been entombed in concrete under the goal posts of a football stadium. Each time someone kicked the extra point, Hoffa's old colleagues would shout, “This one's for you, Jimmy!”