Clete clicked on the radio, then clicked it back off, the color climbing in his neck.
“Say it,” I said.
“It’s your case, handle it the way you want. But I think you cut these bastards too much slack.”
I looked out the window and decided this time not to reply.
Clete turned onto another lane and drove slowly back toward the state road. The sky had darkened and lights were going on in the shotgun houses on either side of us. The boarded-up windows, the junker cars, the wash lines, and the open drainage ditches full of trash were like photos taken by Walker evans during the Great Depression, as though seven decades had not passed. Who was responsible? I have trouble with the notion of collective guilt. But if I had to lay it at anyone’s feet, I’d start with the White League, the Knights of the White Camellia, the Saturday-night nigger-knockers, and all the people who did everything in their power to keep their fellow human beings poor and uneducated and at one another’s throats so they would remain a source of cheap labor.
“Did I piss you off?” Clete said.
“No,” I said. “I think Bertrand Melancon was at Otis Baylor’s house.”
“He wants to square what he did to Baylor’s daughter?”
“Yeah, but how?”
“He could give them the diamonds. But I
don’t think a pus head like Melancon has it in him.”
I was tired and didn’t want to think about it anymore. “I’ll buy you a Dr Pepper up at miller’s market.”
“I can’t wait. Life with you is—”
“What?”
“You’re the best cop I ever knew. But you’re nuts, Dave. You always have been,” he said. “Life with you is like being around a guy who’s got kryptonite for a brain.”
THE CALL CAME in the middle of the night. Outside, the moon was white in the heavens and the wind buffeted the house and whipped leaves down the slope onto the surface of the bayou. I turned on the light in the kitchen and picked up the receiver. The caller ID indicated the caller was using a cell phone. “Mr. Dave?” the voice said.
“Listen, Bertrand—”
“Don’t hang up, man. Somebody shot into my grandmother’s house. I was standing by the window and the bullet come right t’rou the glass. I was packing my things and my grandmother axed me to get her a glass of water. If I ain’t turned around just then, I’d be dead.”
“Who shot at you?”
“I don’t know. This guy Ronald was at my grandmother’s house, pretending he’s some kind of insurance cop, trying to bribe me into telling him where them stones is at. I think he works for Sidney Kovick, except maybe he decided to screw Kovick and put toget’er his own deal. So I called up Kovick and tole him that.”
“You dimed Ronald Bledsoe with Kovick?”
“Yeah, you could put it that way. Hey, man, what worse trouble could I be in? I helped tear Kovick’s house apart. I stole his diamonds and his counterfeit money and his blow and his thirty-eight out of the wall. We even tore the chandeliers out of the ceiling.”
“Kovick had cocaine in his walls?”
“Just one bag. We took it wit’ us. It had already been stepped on. It was his private stash.”
That piece of information didn’t fit, but I didn’t pursue it. “Where are you, Bertrand?”
“Wit’ my grandmother, in a safe place.”
“Where?”
“Look, I tried to make it up to the Baylor family. But they wasn’t interested. I cain’t do no more than what I done. You been straight wit’ me, man, so I t’ought I had to tell you these things. My grandmother didn’t have nothing to do wit’ any of it. She don’t know about no crimes I committed, either, so don’t be hanging an aiding-and-abetting on her.”
“How did you try to make it up, Bertrand?”
“What difference do it make now?”