Clete searched for a dignified response but could think of none. He watched Colin Alridge walk out of the room. His hands felt thick and stiff and useless on top of the linen-covered table. His face was dilated like a balloon, his ears ringing in the quiet, his mouth bitter with the aftertaste of midafternoon whiskey. He wondered if the role of public fool came in incremental fashion with a
ge, or if you simply crossed a line one day and found yourself in a room full of echoes that sounded almost like laughter.
THAT EVENING he sat next to me in a canvas chair on the bayou, at the back of my property, flipping a cork and baited hook from a cane pole out on the edge of the current. The evening sky was green, the wind cool in the trees, and the lights had just come on in the park across the water. A dragonfly lit on the Clete’s cork and floated with it past the flowers blooming among the hyacinths.
“I felt like two cents. Did I read this guy all wrong?” he said.
“Who cares? You’re a good guy, Cletus. You’ve always been on the right side of things. You don’t have to prove anything,” I said.
He had eaten and showered after returning from New Orleans, but his face still had an empty look, like that of a man who has just awakened from sleep and isn’t sure where he is. Clete had been on the full-tilt boogie for more than three decades now, and I wondered if the bill was starting to come due.
“The crazy thing is, I don’t even know why I went after this guy,” he said.
“Because you don’t like frauds and guys who use religion to sell wars.”
He rubbed one eye with his fist. “The guy seemed on the square.”
“He’s not, Clete. He’s a con man, and the guy he’s probably conned the most is himself. But let’s get off the dime here. Alridge knows Bello Lujan’s wife?”
“Yeah, he was upset about the kid getting blown away. I think it really put a nail in his head.”
“Like maybe he feels guilt about it?”
“Something like that. Or maybe he knows why Lujan was killed.”
“So I’m glad you went after him.”
“Really?” he said, looking me at me directly for the first time since his return from New Orleans.
“Really,” I said.
ONE TIME WHILE SWACKED on Cambodian red and a quart of stolen Scotch, a sergeant in my platoon who had served in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam told me he was the wisest man he had ever known.
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“Because I’ve spent a lifetime seeing people in duress,” he replied.
“So?” I said.
“That’s when the best and worst in people comes out. When they’re in duress. Most of the time the best comes out. Sometimes it don’t.”
“What happens when the worst comes out?” I asked.
“You got to remember who you are so you don’t become like the people around you. Each night you tell yourself over and over you got a special place inside you where you live. It’s like a private cathedral nobody can touch. That’s the secret to sanity, Loot. But you can’t tell anybody about your special place.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because once they know you got that private place in your head, they’ll strap you down and kill your brain cells with electroshock.”
I was about to have the opportunity to test the wisdom of the sergeant’s words. Chapter 14
M ONARCH LITTLE’S BAIL was reduced Monday morning on the firearms violation to twenty-five thousand dollars. Through a friendly bondsman who allowed his clients to pay off his ten percent fee on the installment plan, Monarch was back on the street in time for lunch at the same McDonald’s where he’d gotten into it with Slim Bruxal and Tony Lujan.
But the problem with Monarch’s release from jail didn’t lie with Monarch, at least not directly. Helen called me into her office at 1 p.m.
“How much tolerance do you have for Bello Lujan?” she asked.
“Considering the fact he broke out a window in a cruiser with his head in order to spit on me, not very much,” I replied.