"Put him on the phone."
"Leave him alone, Dave. Go away from us."
"Maybe I should catch him another time. Would the inauguration ball be okay?"
"It's by invitation. You won't be attending . . ." She paused, as though she were enjoying a sliver of ice on her tongue. "By the way, since you're a conservationist, you'll enjoy this. I talked to someone about the swamp area around your bait shop being turned into a wilderness preserve. Of course, that will mean commercial property like yours will be acquired by the state or federal government. Oh, Buford's toweling off now. Have a nice day, Dave."
She set the phone down on a table and called out in a lilting voice, "Guess who?"
I heard Buford scrape the receiver up in his hand.
"Don't tell me," he said.
"Shut up, Buford—"
"No, this time you shut up, Dave. Aaron Crown didn't do what he was told. He was supposed to throw his rifle in the water. Instead, he flashed a soda can or something in a window and a trooper started shooting. I tried to stop it."
"You were there?"
"Yes, of course."
"I think you're lying," I said. But his explanation was disarming.
"It's what happened. Check it out."
"The black man who works for me was almost beaten to death last night."
"I'm sorry. But what does that have to do with me?"
I felt my anger and confidence wane. I rubbed at one eye with the heel of my hand and saw concentric circles of red light receding into my brain. My hands felt cold and thick and I could smell my own odor. I started to speak but the words wouldn't come.
&nbs
p; "Dave, are you okay?" he said. His voice was odd, marked with sympathy.
I hung up and sat at the counter and rested my forearms on the counter, my head bent forward, and felt a wave of exhaustion and a sense of personal impotence wash through me like the first stages of amoebic dysentery. Through the window I heard Bootsie's car back into the road, then I saw her and Alafair drive away through the long corridor of oaks toward town. A small metallic mirror hung on a post behind the counter. The miniature face of the man reflected inside it did not look like someone I knew.
CHAPTER 31
CLETE and I went back to Iberia General to visit Batist, then drove to Red Lerille's Gym in Lafayette. Clete ordered a baked potato smothered with cheese and sour cream and bacon strips and green onions at the cafe outside the weight room and ate it at a table by the glass wall and watched me while I worked out for a half hour on the machines. Then he put on a pair of trunks and swam outside in the heated pool and later met me in the steam room.
"How you feel?" he said.
"All right. It's just a touch of the mosquito."
A man sitting next to us folded the newspaper he was reading and lay it on the tile stoop and went out. Clete waited until the man closed the door behind him.
"You're beating up on yourself unfairly, big mon," he said.
"People are dead. No one's in custody. A man like Batist is attacked by a degenerate. Tell me what I've done right."
"You listen to me," he said, and raised his finger in my face. The skin of his massive shoulders and chest looked boiled and red in the steam. "You're a police officer. You can't ignore what you see happening around you. If you fuck up, that's the breaks. In a firefight you stomp ass and take names and let somebody else add up the arithmetic. Get off your own case."
"One day we're going to get your shield back," I said.
He cupped his hand around the back of my neck. I could feel the moisture and grease ooze out from under his palm and fingers. "If I had to play by the rules, I couldn't cover my old podjo's back," he said.
His smile was as gentle as a girl's.