Crusader's Cross (Dave Robicheaux 14)

"It's been quite a day, huh?" she said.

"I suspect she'll sue your agency as well."

"Oh, yes indeed. You can count on Mrs. Poche."

"Helen Soileau stood up for me. I've still got my job. Things could be worse."

She picked up the machete and knocked it clean of bloody feathers against the stump. "You want to go out for dinner tonight and maybe fool around later?" She tossed a strand of hair out of her eye and waited for my reply.

Saturday morning my lawyer, Porteus O'Malley, called the house. "A couple of lowlifes came by my office yesterday," he said. "They claim they were at Clementine's when you remodeled Val Chalons's head. They're willing to testify Chalons tried to pick up a steak knife from a table."

"Who are these guys?" I said.

He told me their names. "They say they're from around here, but they sound like they grew up in New Orleans," he said.

"They used to peel safes with Stevie Giacano. Both of them have bonds with Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine."

He paused. "Is Clete Purcel behind this?"

"His heart is in the right place," I said.

"It's called subornation of perjury. How bad do you want to do time in Angola, Dave?"

The cable show whose intention supposedly was to expose the underside of our little town on the Teche aired that night. It had probably been in the can for weeks, but the producers had managed to bleed in footage of me destroying Val Chalons's face and half of Clementine's Restaurant. Actually, I had to give them credit. The show's juxtaposition of photography was splendidly done. The documentary began with aerial footage of the Louisiana wetlands, serpentine bayous shadowed by cypress and live oak trees, and huge tracts of young sugar cane bending in the wind, followed by land-based, wide-angle shots of plantation homes, street festivals, and sugar refineries shrouded at night inside clouds of electrified steam.

Then a camera obviously mounted on the window of a moving vehicle, as though the subject material had suddenly became a source of danger to the journalists, panned across New Iberia's inner-city slum, showing black dope dealers and white crack whores working the trade on Hopkins Avenue. A moment later the scene shifted to my house and Doogie Dugas and several uniformed cops going through the front entrance, while a woman identified as a Catholic nun stood half-undressed in the bedroom doorway, clutching a shirt against her breasts.

Clete Purcel watched the show in a blue-collar bar on the west end of town, made a call on a pay phone, then drove to my house and threw a pecan hard against my front window.

"What's up, Cletus?" I said, stepping out on the gallery.

"You see the molestation story in the morning paper?"

"Nope."

"You see yourself on television tonight?" he said.

"Yep."

"Stop waiting for Chalons to fall in his own shit. It's time to take this lying cocksucker off at the neck. I've got a call in to Jericho Johnny Wineburger."

I walked into the yard. The wind in the trees caused shadows to slide across Clete's face, like water running down a window glass. He was wearing his porkpie hat and a wilted tropical shirt and gray slacks, and I could smell weed and beer-sweat trapped in his clothes.

"You're kidding, aren't you?" I said.

"You think you can beat these guys playing by the rules? Wake up. They own the ballpark. We're just the humps who carry out the garbage."

"Been toking on a little Mexican gage tonight?"

"No, what I've been doing is wrapping a 'drop' in black tape and filing off a few serial numbers."

"Come on in and eat something."

"I'm going to take Chalons down. Nobody is calling my partner a perve. You see Jericho Johnny around town, pretend you don't."

He climbed in his pink Cadillac and roared off, a tape deck blasting out Bob Seeger's "The Horizontal Bop," leaves blowing from under the wire wheels.

Would Clete actually try to pop Val Chalons? Or was that just a mixture of weed and beer talking? I thought about it. Clete's Caddy swerved at the corner in front of the Shadows, flattening a garbage can into a building.