“Yes, they are, Thelma.”
“No, you mustn’t say that.”
“Somehow they blundered into your life again. You recognized them and you told your old man. You won’t admit that because you’re afraid you’ll provide us with the motivation for his shooting them.”
“Don’t do this to us, Mr. Robicheaux.”
“You’re a stand-up kid. But you’re not thinking clearly. As soon as you told your father these were the guys who attacked you, he had every right to use violent force to protect his home and family. Get a good lawyer and tell him the truth, then come into our office and do the same.”
But she was already running for the inside of her house, like a little girl who has just been tricked into betraying the only friend she has. Chapter 16
C LETE PURCEL’S ADVICE on dealing with mainline perps and full-time dirtbags was simple: When they deal the play, you bust them or dust them. But what about a guy who didn’t have a category? Or worse, one who operated without handles?
Early Saturday morning, Alafair went to City Park with Clete, jogging with him down a serpentine asphalt path that led through live oaks still deep in shadow. Somehow she had convinced herself she could wean him from his diet of booze and fried food and the self-delusion that clanking iron three times a week while he drank a pitcher of vodka Collins would control his weight and reduce his blood pressure.
Rain clouds had sealed the sky and inside the trees the air was warm and almost luminescent with humidity. Clete and Alafair jogged past the old brick firehouse, then across close-cropped St. Augustine grass that was emerald green from the rains, past camellia bushes and islands of hyacinths floating in the bayou and a cypress pond set in the center of the park. They thumped across a wood pedestrian bridge and caught the asphalt again, their eyes stinging with sweat, the smell of burning leaves clinging to their skin. Up ahead they saw a man sitting in a picnic shelter, tying his tennis shoe, his mouth twisted in a self-amused smile. He was overdressed for the morning, his navy blue workout pants dark with sweat below his waist, his matching windbreaker open on a T-shirt that was glued to his breastbone.
“See that dude with the caved-in face?” Clete said, panting with the effort.
“What about him?” Alafair said.
“He’s bad news. Cut across the grass.”
Alafair followed Clete as he angled back toward the bayou, running through shade trees again, down into depressions sprinkled with leaves, tannic with the smell of gas. Then she made a mistake. She looked back over her shoulder at the man with an elongated head and a face that seemed to have melted and been remolded to resemble the back of a thumb.
A moment later she heard a man’s feet pounding the sod behind her, his breath coming hard in his throat.
“Thought that was you,” the man said to Clete. “Who’s your young friend?”
Clete slowed, working hard to catch his wind. “We’re on our run, here,” he said.
“Watch this,” the man said. He sprang onto a picnic bench and caught a limb with both hands, grinning from ear to ear, his exposed stomach fish-belly white, splayed with black hair. He dropped to the ground with a thump. He wiped his hands on the front of his windbreaker, his smile still in place. His eyes were green and recessed, playful as marbles. “I’m ronald,” he said to Alafair.
“How do you do?” she said.
“You didn’t tell me your name,” he said.
“She didn’t give it. We need to finish our regimen, here, Mr. Bledsoe. I’ll chat you up some other time,” Clete said.
“You’re all out of breath, there. I’ve got cold drinks in my cooler. I have some po’boy sandwiches as well.” his eyes shifted to Alafair, lighting with curiosity or perhaps a proprietary sense that he knew and had claim on her. “Are you Mr. Purcel’s daughter?”
“No, I’m not.”
Clete placed both of his hands against a tree trunk, breathing through his nose, his heart rate starting to drop, his head spinning. “I don’t know how else to say this to you, podjo, but you seriously need to dee-dee. That means beat feet down the road. No insult intended.”
“You from South Ca’lina?” Bledsoe asked, ignoring Clete, stiffening an index finger playfully at Alafair.
She looked at her watch and rubbed the glass clean with her wrist. She tapped on it with a fingernail, as though the second hand were stuck. In the silence the man named Bledsoe shifted his weight, his shoe crunching a pecan husk.
“I knew a girl ’Cross the line in Savannah, looked just like you,” he said. “She was part Indian and had the same kind of coloring. She had long legs and wore an ankle bracelet, the kind with little charms all over it. You could hear her jingling when she walked. I always got a kick out of her.”
“Go on without me for a minute,” Clete said to Alafair.
“Dave and Molly are expecting us, Clete,” she replied, squeezing his upper arm. “Let’s go.”
He put his car keys in her hand. “Bring the Caddy around. I blew my circuits. I’ll be all right in a minute.” He winked. “Believe me, I’m copacetic here.”
The keys felt heavy and hard inside her palm, foreign and reductive somehow, as though their presentation to her had relegated her to the level of an object, one that required protection. The sun came out and she saw motes of desiccated leaves swimming in the shafts of light that fell through the tree overhead. The air was damp and stained with the septic odor of a public restroom a few feet away. She wiped a cloud of mosquitoes out of her face and felt a surge of anger like a bubble rising in her chest. A fox squirrel clattered across a limb above her head and involuntarily she looked up at it. When she lowered her gaze, the man named Ronald Bledsoe was staring at her, intrigued, his eyes roving over her features and the broken lines of sweat trickling into her sports bra.