Burning Angel (Dave Robicheaux 8)

The sheriff called me early the next morning.

“I can't just deal you out, Dave. You need to be told this,” he said.

“What?”

“Sweet Pea and a black woman. We're not sure who she is yet.”

“Could you start over?” I said.

During the night a farmer had seen a cone of fire burning in an oak grove out by Cade. The heat was so intense the trees were scaled and baked into black stone. After the firemen covered the Cadillac with foam and stared through the smoke still billowing off the exploded tires, they made out the carbonized remains of two figures sitting erectly on the springs of the front seat, their lipless mouths wide with secrets that had risen like ash into the scorched air.

“The pathologist says double-ought bucks,” the sheriff said.

But he knew that was not the information I was waiting for.

“Sweet Pea had on a locket with his mother's name engraved on it,” he said. Then he said, “I don't have any idea who she is, Dave. Look, I've already tried to find Ruthie Jean. She's disappeared. What else can I tell you? I don't like making this damn phone call.”

I guess you don't, I thought.

Chapter 24

i CALLED CLETE at the small house he had rented by City Park and asked him to meet me at the office on Main. When I got there the newly hired secretary was hanging a curtain on the front window. She was a short, thick-bodied blond woman, with orange rouge on her cheeks and a pleasant smile. “Clete didn't get here yet?” I said. “He went for some coffee. Are you Mr. Robicheaux?”

“Yes. How do you do? I'm sorry, I didn't get your name.”

“Terry Serrett. It's nice to know you, Mr. Robicheaux.”

“You're not from New Iberia, are you?”

“No, I grew up in Opelousas.”

“I see. Well, it's nice meeting you,” I said. Through the window I saw Clete crossing the street with a box of doughnuts and three sealed paper cups of coffee. I met him at the door. “Let's take it with us,” I said. He drove with one hand and ate with the other on the way out to Cade. The top was down and his sandy hair was blowing on his forehead. “How are you going to pay a secretary?” I said.

“She works for five bucks an hour.”

“That's five bucks more than we're making,” I said.

He shook his head and smiled to himself.

“What's the joke?” I asked.

“We're going out to see where Sweet Pea Chaisson got turned into a human candle.”

“Yeah?”

“Are we on somebody's clock? Am I a dumb shit who's missed something?”

“You want to go back?”

He set his coffee cup in a wire ring that was attached to his dashboard and tried to put on his porkpie hat without losing it in the wind.

“You think they're wiping the slate clean?” he said.

“Their object lessons tend to be in Technicolor.”

“Why the black woman?”

“Wrong place, wrong time, maybe. Unless the dead woman is Ruthie Jean Fontenot.”