“You haven’t heard the half of it. Bertrand started talking about bodies under the water in the Lower Nine. He said they glowed under his boat. He said he’s going to Hell for something he did. I told him to take his bullshit to a priest and to lose my cell number. You know what he said?”
I didn’t want to hear more of it. Clete’s face was spotted with color, the way it got when his liver was aching for a drink.
“Bertrand said the last person he wanted to see was a priest. He said it was a priest who caused the bodies in the water to glow.”
“I’m gone,” I said.
“See what happens when I’m straight up with you?” he yelled at my back.
I WENT BACK to the department, my head pounding. The enormous loss of life in New Orleans kept the media focus on Katrina, but Hurricane Rita had hurt us bad, too, and had also flattened or flooded thousands of homes along the southeast Texas coast. In Lake Charles and Orange, Texas, there were blocks of houses that looked like a lumberyard after a tornado has gone through it. My desk and cell phones rang constantly. My intake basket was overflowing, my mailbox stuffed with pink message slips. Every cop, firefighter, and paramedic in the parish was getting by on a few hours’ sleep a night, sometimes on a desktop. Cops and firefighters from other states were on lend-lease to us, but the workload was staggering. I didn’t have time to worry about people who had made bad choices for themselves or whom I couldn’t help, including Father Jude LeBlanc.
Wasted words, wasted words.
In his office Clete had mentioned a detail about the green aluminum boat that I couldn’t get out of my head. I picked up the phone on my desk and punched in his number. “You said you found the boat Bertrand Melancon was using?”
“Yeah, it was upside down under a pile of tree limbs and trash by the emergency room entrance,” he replied. “It looked like it had blood smears on the bow.”
“The words Ducks Unlimited were painted on the hull?”
“Yeah, what about it?”
“Was there anything else on the hull?”
He thought for a second. “A mallard, with its wings outstretched. What’s the deal?”
“Jude LeBlanc’s girlfriend said Jude had found a boat to evacuate his parishioners from the church attic. She said it had a duck painted on it. Jude was chopping a hole in the attic when somebody attacked him. She never saw him again.”
He didn’t reply, and I knew Clete had done something else he wasn’t eager to tell me about.
“What are you hiding?” I said.
“Bertrand Melancon called me again, about three minutes ago. He wants help, but he won’t come in. He thinks I’ll either stomp his ass or turn him over to Sidney Kovick. So I gave him your cell and office numbers. If you don’t want to talk to the guy, just hang up on him.”
“You made the right move.”
“I don’t believe it. Are you feeling okay?” he asked.
THAT EVENING Molly and I ate by ourselves at the kitchen table. Clete had gotten his old room back at the motor court up the street from the Winn-Dixie, and Alafair was working as a volunteer at the evacuee shelter in City Park.
“I thought you’d like smothered steak for a change. You don’t like it?” she said.
I couldn’t focus on her question. “I think Jude LeBlanc probably drowned in the Lower Nine. But maybe his death was a homicide,” I said.
I saw a quiet sense of exasperation take hold in her face, like a bad memory from her sleep that the daylight hours would not dispel. “Dave, nobody can ever change what happened in New Orleans. I remember Jude. I liked him. But he was a sick man.”
“I may have knowledge of a murder. I’m a police officer. I can’t just say, ‘Sorry, sonofabitch, I’ve got my own problems.’”
She looked through the window at the shadows in the pecan trees and live oaks and the wide expanse of Bayou Teche, now twenty feet up in the yard. She set her fork down on her plate. Her thumb ticked at a callus on her palm. “Maybe you should take a nap and rest up before you go back on duty.”
“A street puke by the name of Bertrand Melancon told Clete he saw the bodies of drowned people glowing under his boat in the Lower Nine. I think he and some lowlifes like him attacked Jude and took his boat. I think it cost Jude his life and the lives of people who were waiting in a church attic for Jude to rescue them. That’s hard to blow off.”
Her plate was only half empty. She picked it up and walked outside, peering down the slope as though she wanted to witness the gloaming of the day. I thought perhaps she was going to finish her supper at the picnic table in solitude. But she scraped her smothered steak and rice and brown gravy and creamed corn on the ground for Tripod and Snuggs. When she came back in, she washed her dishes and knife and fork in the sink, set them in the dry rack, and let out her breath. “I think I’ll take a walk. Do you want to come?” she said.
“Not right now, thanks.”
“Then
I’ll see you later.”